4 What we leave behind

Freud reminds us that mourning is both a labour and mode of haunting – it works within and through us in the mental images of the lost object.

The surviving traces we leave behind have expanded from a social history of largely discrete physical objects in time and space to spatially abstract, temporally complex digital artefacts. Both constitute the economic and emotional stakes of inherited responsibilities and potential legacies of a life. In , Michael Harris signals the passing of a generation whose biography began outside computers and digital media networks. This is a generation in which digital things – the stuff of the internet, emails, mobile phones, and their internal data – have little or no deep biographical or mnemonic significance. This is a dying generation, and a dying way of life where the physical photograph, contained in the photograph album, contained in the home, was a customary practice of shared memory-making and dwelling with the memories and images of others.