Social Media as the Spatiotemporally Unconfined Cult of the Dead (original) (raw)
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Online identities survive the deaths of those they represent, leaving friends and families to struggle with the appropriate ways to incorporate these identities into the practices of grief and mourning, raising important questions. How are practices of online memorialization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role of online digital identity post-mortem? How do trajectories of death and dying incorporate both online and offline concerns?
Informasi
Today, one may no longer alive but his social networking sites (SNS) account will still live on. Empirical studies on death and SNS started since 2004 covering issues on grief, bereavement, mourning, relational continuity functions of SNS, and digital legacy. Majority of them applied content and discourse analyses on SNS messages directed to or related to the deceased. Applying McLuhan’s aphorism medium is the message, researcher focused on the interplay among forms and functions of Facebook (FB) as a medium and message that mediates grief and the bereaved persons who are communicators that decided to grieve on FB. This research adopts grounded theory approach where in- depth interviews with 10 bereaved persons who maintain relational continuity with their deceased loved ones through FB were conducted. The conclusions are drawn to prove that bereaved users preferred to engage in a transcoporeal mediated communication with deceased for continuing bonds due to four main reasons – the ...
E-(ternal) grieving: The digitalization and redefining of death and loss on social media
Simulacra, 2023
The practice of grieving from a socio-cultural perspective is never an impersonal matter. The attachment to different organized values and habits prevents the individual from determining the attitudes and emotions that must be shown when grieving. This fact raises the question of the place of traditional mourning practices in society amidst the invasion of new technologies, i.e. social media. The study uses qualitative methods to analyze some Instagram content related to mourning the loss of several public figures in Indonesia. In the case studies examined, the contribution of big technology gives us autonomy, but it is only a phantasmagorical one. Ultimately, our identities will continue to control what we do in cyberspace and in the natural world. Social media is only an alternative space for the manifestation of correlated socio-cultural values, including the implementation of norms in mourning. Nevertheless, the freshness offered in the practice of mourning on social media is that people can now immerse themselves in a longer liminal period and preserve the communication and social status of the deceased with the available function of perpetual mourning. The results of the study should stimulate further research on how technology can shape society in the digital age.