Beyond the page: Visual and digital layers in caitlin doughty’s creative nonfiction

Section 1. Digital Death: Expanding The Death-Positive Narrative Online 1. Introduction Undoubtedly, the ways in which we communicate and receive information are undergoing a significant transformation. With the digital age in full swing, we can expect even more advancements in technology in the future. Content creators of all kinds have adapted to these changes and have learned how to take advantage of them to their benefit. Caitlin Doughty is an author who has embraced the opportunities that multimodality and digitalization offers. Her YouTube channel and podcast are excellent examples of how writers can transition their work into something more interactive and engaging for a younger audience that is accustomed to this mode of communication. By combining various elements such as the written word, illustrations, audio-visual components, and a robust digital community, Doughty has created a web of multimodal elements that are impossible to undo. Her passion for her work and ideas are evident in her death-positive manifestos, which form a crucial part of this community. Without her dedication, this community would not have been as well-defined as it is today. Multimodality is an unavoidable element that we ought to interact with during our digital age. It encompasses a wide range of modes used to transmit information, no matter the topic chosen by the digital creator. However, writers can also be creators and use their texts as inspiration to build extensions of their work for a more impactful encounter with the reader/viewer. One example is Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, and death positivity activist, who uses creative nonfiction to express her beliefs about the modern individual’s increasing death phobia and how we can fight it. She is not only a writer but also a YouTube creator. Her videos and her written discourse mirror each other perfectly, and readers/viewers take on these two roles interchangeably. This section aims to show in what ways the written text and the YouTube videos resemble, where the two intersect, and how they impact the readership/viewership regarding death positivity. The importance of this study can be seen in the way in which social media and digital modes are now used by activists to grow the popularity of cultural movements and to transmit their manifestos to a large mass of people.