"In exploring virtual mourning practices and their implications for death consumption in general, new questions in the field of consumer research emerge. It is hoped that once we gain some understanding of how online mourning practices illuminate notions of ‘materiality’ and/or ‘embodiment’ in the context of death and dying, we can begin to delineate what is actually new about this phenomenon and what the differences are between online and pre-digital behaviours in the context of the consumption of death. On this basis, then, we can then proceed to ask how consumers’ behaviours of digital death consumption are likely to change in the future. In the rest of this chapter, I explore key insights into the consumption of death in consumer society today, drawing connections between notions of materiality in physical worlds as well as virtual worlds. I draw upon a number of key disciplines for their insights into these issues: sociology (for theories of the desire to perpetuate the tension between ephemeral pleasures and the finality of death); philosophy and anthropology (for an understanding of how we frame embodiment and imagine ‘materiality’ through the performance of mourning rituals) and computer science (for conceptualizations of interactions on virtual worlds)." (Page 397)