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Digital sleep tracking has become part of everyday life via smartphones with in-built sensors, dedicated sleep tracking software, and a range of peripherals. In a context of mediatised and managed sleep, this paper seeks to schematise the scope of consumer technologies, products, and media taking shape in the sleep industry. We outline a five-part taxonomy of sleep media technology: instrumentalisation of sleep data; augmentation of bedroom material; routinisation of sleep atmosphere; hacking of sleep rhythms; and finally, modulation of neurological states. We argue these technology types amalgamate to position sleep as in-crisis, while concurrently, commodifying this problem with digital "solutions" intervening at different scales, from the brain to body to bedroom to environment. Emerging from marketing and popular media coverage are new norms of "good sleep" and "sleep hygiene," normalising a discussion of "how" (rather than "if") digital technologies can measure, datafy, optimise, automate, and bioengineer sleep.

Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a 'material death' that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.