Death and Technology.

Wherever there's a new mimetic technology, there's someone deploying it to capture a dead man's soul.

The photograph is the perfect example of this phenomena. Funerary photography started in photography's early days. The premise? Shoot portraits of your dead relative to preserve their souls. This practice has recently seen a resurgence. Today it's camera phones, which in Japan are being used to send images of funerals instantly to those who simply can't be there to see the soul in rapturous escape. Now it appears, people are tweeting funerals, live micro-blogging the event to life cache that very moment.

When you're talking mimetic technologies--and Twitter, a narrative representation of your presence, falls in that category--you're talking magic. They have the power to capture souls.

Twitter [via Gawker, of course]