Communication as travel: The genre of letters to the dead in public media.

The phenomenon of personally addressing the dead through letters published in public media is a prevalent communicative practice that has earned little academic notice. This practice disrupts some common communication principles and provides us with new understandings of how communication works – by travelling, rather than reaching an end. To encapsulate and characterize this phenomenon, this article focuses on an Israeli case study of letters written to the dead and published in popular newspapers. I use a media ecology approach to phenomenologically classify five sets of characteristics in order to stimulate future discussion and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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