Personal blogs and Mourning: the writing of self on the Net as a support etwork in situations of help (original) (raw)
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Dead Baby Bloggers: Making Sense of Death Through Online Grieving
The experience of death and grieving may be universal, but some people involved with death and grieving have needs that are not met in our proximate communities. Social and cultural norms around grief and grieving are not broken without repercussions and responses to death and grief are highly policed and regulated. What happens when one’s responses to death or expressions of grief do not follow the norms? Where does one find the means of expression, and the support of others? This paper will present findings that demonstrate that grieving online via pseudonymous weblogging can allow people to grieve without fear of repercussions, and simultaneously build supportive communities. The practice of online grieving is now a large part of the grieving process for internet users. My experiences as part of an online grieving community of women with dead children (Dead Baby Mamas, or DBMs), a subset of grievers who experience specific issues, many of which are not recognized or addressed by family, friends, or healthcare professionals. My participant observation research that found that DBMs blog whilst using a pseudonym and not telling their friends and family that they are blogging in order to create an outlet for grief that is labeled “inappropriate” or “unhealthy.” This Pseudonym + Concealment Combination, allows people to grieve in ways that flout social grieving norms without fearing repercussion, and connect with fellow grievers in the process. What can we learn about responses to death and expressions of grief from these findings? We can make recommendations about using the internet for grieving, but we also need to take seriously the experiences of people who do not fit the “normal” patterns of responses to death and expressions of grief. How do we meaningfully accommodate diverse ways of grieving, indeed of dying? Key Words: Online grieving, online anonymity/pseudonymity, grief blogging, grieving norms, grieving and diversity.
Blogs: Life Writing on the Net
“Weblog” – or, in its clipped form, “blog” – has by now entered everyday language and is shared knowledge. Indeed, hearing or reading of someone’s blog either on TV or in newspapers, is definitely not unusual. A blog can roughly be defined as a Web page constantly updated by someone who daily (or periodically) expresses his/her own opinions. The definition surprisingly finds its immediate visual parallel in the image of a person keeping his/her journal, paper and pen being replaced by p.c. screen and keyboard. Significantly, when blog was declared word of the year in 2004 by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, its definition read as: “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer” 1 . At present, many studies have focussed on the effects that some famous blogs happen to have in terms of public resonance, especially in the fields of politics, public affairs, and showbiz, thus leading to interpret the blog as a powerful democratic alternative to mainstream media, although its collocation in the field of journalism seems to represent only one side of the Weblog coin. Empirical evidence shows the impressively wide use of this form of electronic writing as a means of self-expression, as a new form of life writing, where intimate day-to-day feelings and opinions are vented in online journals. A full account of the ongoing changes and development trends of diary writing cannot ignore the fact that this genre, among many others, is currently facing the widespread use of the electronic medium: just as any discourse on contemporary letter-writing necessarily entails reflections on the email phenomenon, similarly, dealing with 21 st -century journal writing inevitably means considering the Weblog as one of its possible distinctive and peculiar instantiations. Bearing all this in mind, in my paper I first outline and contextualize the distinctive features of Weblogs, with special reference to the multi-modal type of communication employed and then, in the wake of the well-established tradition of linguistic theories on genre analysis, I discuss a possible genre categorization of Weblogs, so as to identify their textual/structural similarities with and differences from diaries and journals.
“It’s your loss”: Making loss one’s own through blog narrative practices
Death Studies, 2018
This study investigated whether the 30 prompted categories of Gillies, Neimeyer, and Milman's (2014) Meaning of Loss Codebook (MLC) emerged in the unprompted and naturalistic blogs of four grieving widows. Furthermore, the study aimed to examine how such meanings emerged through each participant's processes of narrativization. Results showed that 26 of 30 MLC meanings emerged over 582 posts. Furthermore, in blogs demonstrating continued bonds with the deceased, MLC meanings formed networks integrated within narrative pathways. Conversely, in cases where severing ties were formulated as a condition of "moving on," meanings appeared in isolation of narrative and complications in narrativization were evident.
2013
Blogs have been used extensively to self-document the intimate and often intensive experiences of living with serious illness, charting their author’s health and treatment often over many years, connecting with others and drawing attention and concern along the way. This paper analyses a selection of typical ‘cancer blogs’ with the aim of understanding the kinds of personal investment, or labour, involved in the process of forming and maintaining them over a sustained period. Where previous research has investigated what is often seen as the ‘empowering’ role of these blogs, we attempt to qualify these claims. Our qualitative, case study analysis draws on and expands the theory and debates around the nature of immaterial and affective labour. We highlight the value of cancer blogging as personal, in the form of identity and affect management, network-enabling in generating online spaces for shared experience and support, and social in what is recouped in the forms of non-institutional management of serious illness. In addition, this labour helps to shape the broader social understanding of cancer, its experience and personal affects.
Talking about his dead child, again!" Emotional self-management in relation to online mourning
First Monday
This paper explores a group of Dane’s motives for and experiences with using their personal Facebook profile to cope with the death of a close relative, based on extensive semi-structured media-go-along interviews. The focus of the article is on what I label emotional self-management, which came up repeatedly during the interviews as an integrated part of mourning online. It is argued that Facebook is used as an outlet for expressing thoughts and feelings that are often experienced as bypassed or silenced in off-line social interactions. However, these expressions of grief take place within a techno-social space, where one balances on a tight line between an allowed enactment of a private public self and a denigrated enactment of an oversharing, too transgressive intimate self. One is allowed to mourn but not excessively. In trying to balance sharing but not oversharing it is argued that the interviewees engage in continous dialog with multiple internal and external others.
To Mourn, To Re-imagine without Oneself: Death, Dying, and Social Media/tion
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience [Special issue on Illness Narratives], 2018
This paper incorporates and reflects on Steinberg's particular vantage as a dying person whose blog engages the transforming ecologies of mourning and the place(s) of dying in the emergent spaces of social media. The paper homes in on the distinction between the repudiation of death and the repudiation of mourning in the collective project of " re-imagining without oneself, " that is, of re-imagining another life, another death, beyond the liberal coordinates of a " you " and a " me. " As an " intermediating " place, we argue that the blog serves as a virtual portal that both problematizes and (re)mediates the personal and the political. In so doing, the paper touches on key feminist political questions concerning bodily self-sovereignty; the broader racialized, classed, and gendered cultural imaginary; and
Depression Narratives in Blogs: A Collaborative Quest for Coherence
People with depression often suffer from severe social seclusion, and the lack of an agreed upon etiology for depression makes it difficult to satisfactorily narrate and “ritually control” it. Focusing on blogs by women with major depression, I delineate the ways in which bloggers publicly express and collaboratively reconstruct their depression narratives. Specifically, using thematic analysis, I argue that depression blogs uniquely bridge between the seclusion that characterizes depression and the exposure offered in blogs, and thus offer people a rare opportunity to publicly share very intimate depression narratives, form communal bonds with their readers, and collaboratively revise their narratives. Depression blogs are also shown to function as “narrative sandboxes”—protected spaces in which bloggers can temporarily and experimentally add or remove different sections from their illness narratives, assess the compatibility of different cultural frameworks, and interchangeably use various metaphors, in an attempt to satisfactorily explain depression.
Mourning with Social Media : Rewiring grief.pdf
The aim of the present paper is to two fold. First, to explore the emotion of grief by reviewing the most prominent approaches that have attempted to understand it, and secondly to explore the modernized ways of mourning through social media. Since the advent of technology and newer forms of digital platforms the utilization of networking sites have significantly increased. This has set the tone for the present discussion since interacting with the internet especially through social media have become an integral part of every individuals lifestyle. Social networking sites have become a common site for reaching out to others for a sense of support and connection - it has also become a site to express grief and bereavement. The present paper attempts to bring together existing literature on how digital spaces have proven to be extraordinarily therapeutic for grieving individuals. The commentaries and studies swing between conflicting forms of evidence - on the one hand, grieving through social media is pointing to becoming a formalized death ritual in the 21st century, while on the other hand highlighting certain morbidness that expressions on social media prove to be, which seem to trivialize the very emotion of grief. While the sincerity of such forms of expression continue to be questioned, the reality of mourning through digital platforms must be acknowledged.