The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief

Abstract

This article analyzes comments posted in response to articles and blog posts discussing Facebook's policies on the pages of deceased site members. These virtual discourses reflect the sociocultural importance of social media policies in everyday life that is increasingly a blend of online and offline interaction. The analysis reveals themes of contested ownership of online identities, resistance to unilateral institutional policies, and social media site users’ complex relationship to the preservation of virtual content. As a still-evolving phenomenon, virtual grief elucidates wider cultural trends at work in the construction of identity and community online.

Keywords:

• online grief
• bereavement
• memorial
• Facebook
• SNS
• social media
• policy

Acknowledgments

© Jessa Lingel

Notes

1. “Protocols” refers to “social and cultural practices that have grown up around […] technology” (Jenkins 2006, 13–14).

2. It should be noted that this construction of social death is considerably different than that of Sudnow (1967), for whom social death refers to the moment at which a physically alive person is no longer treated as such.

3. In their quantitative analysis of blog comments, Mishne and Glance (2006) argued that “by overlooking comments, much of the conversation around many influential blogs is being missed” (3), because comments “provide access to a different perspective of weblog posts, namely, the impact on their readers” (4).

4. A number of online companies have emerged to offer a variety of services for managing online identity after death, including Death Switch (http://deathswitch.com), Legacy Locker (http://www.legacylocker.com), MyHeartwill (http://www.myheartwill.com), and the Vault (http://www.mylastsong.com), among others. The services offered by these vendors vary from information insurance to password security to creating media content to be sent to friends and family after death. Thus, there is a commercialized version of creating tools and applications for monitoring online grief even as there are also developing social protocols.

5. According to Facebook's terms of service, users “own all of the content and information” posted on Facebook. However, for content considered intellectual property, including videos and photos, by creating an account, users grant Facebook “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that [is posted] on or in connection with Facebook” (Facebook 2010a).