Living in the digital ether: The evolution of bereavement and abolishment of death in a technological society. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Media as the Spatiotemporally Unconfined Cult of the Dead
Diskurse, Dispositive und Subjektivitäten. Theorie und Praxis der Diskursforschung, 2022
Death is one of the only experiences guaranteed to all living beings. However, its timing, whereabouts, and the actual experience of this concluding life event remain largely unknown. While a person may be surrounded by other people when lying on her or his deathbed, death itself stays an individual experience that, once completed, does not allow the deceased to convey any knowledge about it with the bereaved. Simultaneously, internet and communication technologies play an increasingly important role in re-creating and distributing knowledge. While research on social media and death has focused on the impact of such fora on the bereaved, this study elicits their potential for those suffering from a terminal illness. Following a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, final Facebook posts are analyzed and their significance as a new ritual of farewell is discussed. The results point to the high degree of agency that dying individuals practice on social media for staging their final bow out, thus also impacting the existent societal discourse on dying and death.
New mourners, old mourners: Online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning
How does online mourning differ from offline mourning? Demographic, social and technological changes alter mourners’ social relationships with both the living and the dead, and hence their experiences of grief. Online technologies comprise the latest chapter in this story; earlier chapters include family/community mourning (pre-industrial), private mourning (twentieth century), and public mourning (turn of the millennium). Pervasive social media in which users generate their own content have significantly shifted mourners’ social interactions and the norms that govern them, partly in new directions (such as enfranchising previously stigmatised griefs; more potential for conflict between mourners and others) but partly returning to something more like the relationships of the pre-industrial village (such as everyday awareness of mortality, greater use of religious imagery, more potential for conflict among mourners). Online, mourners can experience both greater freedom to be themselves and increased social pressure to conform to group norms as to who should be mourned and how.
Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis
OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying, 2012
The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.
Death is one of the most significant human events and rites of passage, fundamentally shaping the life course of individuals, families and social networks. For this reason, recognizing that someone has died and ritualizing this loss requires forms of communication and mediation between individuals and families in relation to wider social networks. Media has always played a significant part in how people are informed of a death, enabling rituals to proceed such as death notices and obituaries in newspapers. Today, information communication technologies (ICTs) and social media are routinely part of how people are informed about death, and enact a range of socially shared mourning and remembrance processes. This paper explores the current deployment of ICTs and social networking within practices and rituals of mourning, applying media theory. It focuses on the temporality of mourning in a culture of speed and the activation of mourning from the announcement of death to the cycles of anniversaries via social networking culture and through technological forms of automation. The question of how the bereaved (those significantly effected by a death) take or lose control of when and how they mourn and remember the dead in a technologically networked culture is this paper’s central concern.
Wiring death: dying, grieving and remembering on the internet
Online networks and digital media have been integrated into contemporary processes of dying, grieving and memorial, changing the social context in which dying takes place and establishing new electronic spaces for the communication of grief. This chapter argues that the study of death online should be cultivated as a valuable interdisciplinary research field, with particular attention to three themes: using death and mourning to improve our understanding of digital media, using online communication as a source of insight into experiences of dying and grieving, and examining the changes in the experience and practice of dying and mourning that are being brought about by the integration of digital media into everyday life. I explore these themes with a number of case studies, including the death of Michael Jackson, the rise of online memorials, the role of social network sites in mourning and responses to death in online religious and gaming communities.
Automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead
Continuum, 2015
Death is one of the most significant human events and rites of passage, fundamentally shaping the life course of individuals, families and social networks. For this reason, recognizing that someone has died and ritualizing this loss requires forms of communication and mediation between individuals and families in relation to wider social networks. Media has always played a significant part in how people are informed of a death, enabling rituals to proceed such as death notices and obituaries in newspapers. Today, information communication technologies (ICTs) and social media are routinely part of how people are informed about death, and enact a range of socially shared mourning and remembrance processes. This paper explores the current deployment of ICTs and social networking within practices and rituals of mourning, applying media theory. It focuses on the temporality of mourning in a culture of speed and the activation of mourning from the announcement of death to the cycles of anniversaries via social networking culture and through technological forms of automation. The question of how the bereaved (those significantly effected by a death) take or lose control of when and how they mourn and remember the dead in a technologically networked culture is this paper's central concern.
Death in digital spaces: social practices and narratives
International Conference on Cultural Informatics, Communication & Media Studies, 2020
Purpose: In post-modern society, Internet and social media mediate between daily life processes such as death, establishing new forms of social interaction among social actors and creating new norms. The creation of digital cemeteries and the usage of the services they offer by Internet users, the conversion of a deceased person’s Facebook profile into a profile “Remembering” or the replacement of a user's profile photo by a black background in cases of grieving, demonstrate emphatically the new dimensions that the event of death takes on Internet and social media, leading to the building of a public experience, despite the fact that in Western societies death is considered to be a private affair.Methods: This paper based on an in-depth review of the literature deals with death as an event mediated by new technologies, since Internet and social media have given the opportunity for new narratives about the experience of death and have contributed to the emergence of new social pr...
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.
Thanatos, 2014
Impending death and the event of passing can leave one in a state beyond bereavement, leading to a penchant for rationalizing the entire process. Increasingly people turn to social media not only as a community of mourners who come together to share their grief, but also to create chronicles of hope for the deceased's life-before-death through acts of sharing emotional narratives, prayers of faith, as well as relational visuals awaiting the passing away. These digital networking communities have displayed the power to hold onto the fleeting. Social media possess an inherent quality of conceptual permanence that make them transitional public conduits for talking about the possibility of miracles to halt imminent death, fluidly followed by discussions of the transience of life.
" We are a United Humanity " : Death, Emotion and Digital Media in the Church of Sweden
2017
This article seeks to bring together the study of death, digital media, emotion and religion, using a Christian organization as a case study. The Swedish national church (Svenska kyrkan) has a large but declining membership and uses digital media extensively. We will analyze two of its attempts to respond to grief through media: a hybrid digital-physical technology installation in Swedish cemeteries and a series of posts about death and sadness on Facebook. In both projects, the Church presents emotion as a universal shared experience that unites all humanity, using this discourse to bring together its religious and non-religious audiences.