In a digital society, shall we be the authors of our own experience, not only during our lifetime but also after we die? We ask this question because dying and bereavement have become even harder, and much less private, in the digital age. New big data-driven digital industries and technologies are on the rise, with promises of interactive 3D avatars and storage of digital memories of the deceased, so they can continue to exist online as the “living dead” in a digital afterlife. Famous rock and roll icons like Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Ronnie James Dio, and Amy Winehouse have famously been turned into holograms that can once again give “live” performances on the touring circuit, often pulling in large audiences. Death studies, dying, and grief have become virtual in the 21st century. We live in truly unprecedented times for human-computer interactions. Thanatology is the scientific study of death, dying, loss, and grief. In contrast to the biological study of biological aging (cellular senescence) and programmed cell death (apoptosis), thanatology employs multiple professional lenses, medical, psychological, physical, spiritual, ethical, descriptive, and normative. In 1997, Carla Sofka introduced the term thanatechnology as “technological mechanisms such as interactive videodiscs and computer programs that are used to access information or aid in learning about thanatology topics.” Onward to 2021, the advent of social media, the Internet of Things, and sensors that digitize and archive nearly every human movement and experience are taking thanatechnology, and by extension, digital transformation, to new heights. For example, what happens to digital remains of persons once they cease to exist physically? This article offers a critical study and snapshot of this nascent field, and the “un-disciplinary” sociotechnical issues digital thanatechnologies raise in relation to big data. We also discuss how best to critically govern this new frontier in systems science and the digital society. We suggest that new policy narratives such as (1) the right to nonparticipation in relation to information and communication technologies and (2) the planetary public goods deserve further attention to democratize thanatechnology and big data. To the extent that systems science often depends on data from online platforms, for example, in times of pandemics and ecological crises, “critical thanatechnology studies,” introduced in this article, is a timely and essential field of scholarship with broad importance for systems science and planetary health.

Digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are changing how we live and do research, for example, the ways in which patient-reported outcomes and phenomics big data are curated and analyzed. Digital transformation is everywhere and is reshaping data (im)mortality in a wide range of sectors in medicine, engineering, journalism, and beyond. In this context, thanatechnology is a term introduced by Carla Sofka over two decades ago, referring to “any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss, and illness.” The field of thanatechnology has become relevant in the digital age as social media is full of accounts from dead individuals, whereas digital media is often harnessed as a source of data and metadata, and in times of pandemics and normalcy. Emerging macroscale analyses forecast billions of social media user accounts from deceased persons in the current century. What happens to digital remains of persons once they cease to exist physically? Digital death, or its absence in the case of deceased individuals, becomes a challenge for both data availability and veracity, and confound research and public health services. Data (im)mortality and digital death are also relevant for research on past events of significance for public health, for example, to discern the history of pandemics and ecological threats. This article examines and calls for new ways of thinking about digital death and thanatechnology as integral dimensions of digital transformation in medicine, new media studies, and society in the 21st century.

Biyolojik olarak kadın ve erkek olmak toplumun devamlılığını sağlamada temel belirleyicidir ve onlara anne, baba gibi başat ve değişmeyen roller vermektedir. Bu rollere dayandırılarak geçmişten günümüze farklı roller ve sorumluluklar da verilmiştir. Atfedilen roller ve sorumluluklar toplumların, teknolojik ve bilimsel gelişmelerine, yaşadıkları coğrafi şartlara, kültürel yapısını oluşturmada önemli bir etkiye sahip olan inanç sistemlerine ve bireylerinin eğitim düzeylerine göre değişkenlik göstermektedir. Diğer taraftan cinsiyetlere atfedilen roller yine her toplumun içindeki aynı temel prensiplerle uyumlu bir yapıda yeniden kurgulanarak üretilmeye devam ettirilmektedir. Fakat toplumların gelişmişlik durumuna paralel cinsiyetlere atfedilen roller ve sorumluluklar eşitsizlikten eşitliliğe veya farklılıklardan benzerliklere doğru eğilim göstermektedir. Cinsiyet rollerin ve sorumlulukların öğretilmesinde ve aktarılmasında ise aile, eğitim kurumları ve günümüzde kitle iletişim araçları güçlü bir etkiye sahiptir. Rolleri ve sorumlulukları aktarma gücü dikkate alınarak kitle iletişim araçlarının bir mecrası olan televizyonun da, hazırlanan program içeriklerinde geçen söylemleri, önemlidir. Mevcut çalışmada ise ulusal yayın yapan üç farklı TV kanalında yayınlanan evlilik programlarından çalışmanın verisi elde edilmiştir. Belirlenen evlilik programlarının içeriklerinde geçen söylemler aracılığıyla, cinsiyetlere atfedilen roller ve sorumlulukların eşit veya benzer olmasını saptamak amaçlanmıştır ve Van Dijk’ın eleştirel söylem analizi yöntemi kullanılarak, çalışmanın amacına uygun bulunan söylemler analiz edilmiştir. Sonuç, incelenen söylemler aracılığıyla aktarılan toplumsal cinsiyet rolleri ve sorumluluklarında, kadın ve erkeğe eşit ve benzer roller verilmediği tespit edilmiştir.

Being aware of its own self through social interaction with other people, humanity is discovering new ways to meet the need for socialization and to interact with other people based on communication in the 21st century. The social isolation that emerged with the Covid-19 pandemic is an important obstacle to the social life of modern people and the sustainability of the entertainment industry. However, in line with the need for socialization, people create their own online social activities by overcoming these obstacles with the communication technologies of the age. This new sector, which emerged at a time of global crisis, allows the formation of new economic capital of digitalization. Within the scope of the study, the adaptation of the entertainment sector, which experienced a shrinkage in its economic volume during the pandemic, to the digital world as a way of salvation is examined. Various online activities carried out in line with this review have been examined in detail, and the future of the sector is discussed with the findings obtained.

The speed with which artificial intelligence has proliferated in organizational decision-making has intensified the accountability crisis. In finance, healthcare, and human resources, AI systems increasingly influence high-risk decision outcomes, with stakeholders demanding transparency concerning how decisions are made and accountability for failures. Yet prevailing understandings of explainability are limited by siloed responsibility structures, weak audit trails, and an under-specified “explainability burden”—the labor associated with the production, maintaining, verifying, and assuring of explanations for decisions made by AI. This conceptual article builds a framework for distributing that burden among key stakeholders (AI developers, data providers, process owners, auditors) using blockchain as an immutable governance infrastructure. Building on research in algorithmic accountability, institutional theory and distributed governance, the article proposes a framework for quantifying explanation expectations as a function of risk exposure and capacity and implementing these allocations through smart contracts as smart contracts on blockchain platforms. The model regards explainability as a measurable burden that must be strategically allocated to ensure transparency and legitimacy. I derive five testable propositions linking blockchain-based auditability to accountability outcomes, stakeholder trust, regulatory compliance and organizational learning, and provide insights for organizations dealing with the EU AI Act, GDPR Article 22 and upcoming AI governance regimes.

This chapter introduces a mechanism-to-signal approach to detecting fraud activities and protocol attacks in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) through machine learning. It maps to observables on-chain the mechanics of exploits in attacking the smart contract (e.g. smart contract exploits, economic manipulation, phishing, cross-chain bridge failure, transaction order abuse through transacts and erroneous call tracing) down to observable transactions, call traces, event logs, and state transitions. A structured taxonomy is the way to link these signatures to the supervised, anomaly-based, graph, and temporal models subject to such constraints as label scarcity, class imbalance, concept drift, and latency. Producible features of engineering, risk calibration and cost-wise evaluation are emphasized in this methodology. The deployment patterns combine the model outputs with governance and audit requirements, integrating the detection within an operational accountability architecture instead of a solution-oriented predictive model.