Online memorial culture: an introduction

A brief research history

Over the last decades, death, dying, and (online) bereavement culture in the Western world have constituted a growing field of attention in the academic world. Much of the research has been nationally based and focused on monographic studies of specific fields, such as practices related to dying, burial traditions, and grave traditions. However, in recent years, the field has developed, becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary and with the formation of professional networks across countries.

The research tradition has evolved out of clinical practices (see, for instance, Davies, 2004, 2005; Rando, 1986) and therapeutic traditions (see, for instance, Brotherson & Soderquist, 2002; Stroebe et al., 2005) and along the way meeting the demand for a greater societal understanding of the needs and practices in medical and social institutions and among practitioners. Thus, the field has mainly been researched and documented by social workers, palliative care, (health services) and sociologists.

At the same time, but separately, anthropologists have studied death as an inherently social phenomenon. This includes the social technologies surrounding it in classical death studies such as Hertz (1907) and more recent studies like Bloch and Parry (1982). These studies are most often focused on dealing with death outside of the Western world and are based on ethnographic field studies. However, in recent years also, the anthropological study of death has become more cross-disciplinary and focused on practices of death in present-day Western countries (see, for instance Christensen & Sandvik, 2014; Christensen & Willerslev, 2013; Harper, 2012).

Existing research includes not only studies of institutionalized practices concerning death, burial, mourning, and so on, but also studies focusing on the practices of bereavement as it is performed in more mundane settings (see, for instance, Davies, 2002; Venbrux, 2008). As such, these studies relate to the concept of everyday life as such (Elias, 1998; Featherstone, 1992) and in relation to death practices (Gibson, 2008).

In recent years, media research has contributed to the field of death studies. Mediatization studies have focused on how various societal practices are influenced by media logics (Livingstone, 2009; Lundby, 2009) including religious practices (Hepp & Krönert, 2010; Hjarvard, 2011) and practices surrounding death and dying (Sumiala & Hakola, 2013). This tradition corresponds with research into the domestication of media (Haddon, 2004; Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992) and its role in everyday life where digital media are playing an increasingly important role (Helles, 2012). The study of media in everyday life has a long tradition; however, empirical studies specifically focusing on uses of media in relation to grieving as everyday life practices are limited (Sumiala, 2013, being a prominent exception).

However, studies in online death and memorial culture constitute a rapidly maturing field of research focusing on how death and grief are dealt with on various online platforms and social media, asking how the Internet and social media may be changing our ways of grieving and mourning (Carroll & Landry, 2010; Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, & Pitsillides, 2011) and our concepts of death and bereavement (Mitchell, Stephenson, Cadell, & Macdonald, 2012). These studies are often platform-specific (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2013; Haverinen, 2014; Pennington, 2014; Klastrup, 2013), for instance, dealing with practices of grief and commemoration in online worlds and games, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

Background

This Special Issue on Online Memorial Culture is based on selected proceedings from the First International Death Online Research Symposium, held at the Durham University, England, 9–10 April 2014. The symposium was arranged by the Death Online Research Network, which primarily is an informal online gathering of around 80 researchers interested in the field.¹ As the physical death becomes more and more visible on the Internet, the research field is similarly fast growing, and this Special Issue covers an important corner, Online Memorial Culture.

In the following, we introduce briefly the media platforms involved in contemporary dealings with death. However, even if it is an intriguing way of sorting out the many variations, it primarily highlights a technological perspective. Thus, we proceed into a sociocultural perspective establishing death, grief, and memorialization as social practices. The ongoing memorial practices alter the visibility of physical death as they are integrated in our everyday life, for instance through the use of online technologies, and thus challenging the notions of the modern sequestration of death. Thus, we argue in favor of a reintroduction of awareness and coping with loss and grief in the extended social network. This is a change for the individual as well as for the collective, and the articles in this Special Issue make a convincing argument for broader cultural change around death and dying in the Western hemisphere. The contributors thus prove a parallel point: as a research area, death online might be telling us interesting things about identity work, emotional coping, and the ways in which such efforts are shared and performed socially and culturally.

Mediation and remediation

The physical death is mediated online. Before, just around, and after the actual death, we are in different ways able to find and view online the activities connected to the passing of a human being (Gotved, 2014a). As our everyday life is increasingly interconnected with all sorts of practical online activities (from buying groceries to finding an undertaker), the emotional life is not far behind.

The physical death has entered the online sphere, and even if it still might be seen as somewhat transgressing and provoking (shown by for example the fuss made around the photos harvested on Instagram and presented as “Selfies at funerals” [Feifer, 2013]), it is shared out there. In this Special Issue, we have contributions that draw on empirical findings from Facebook, weblogs, memorial websites, and YouTube, and while we know of more media platforms (for example, memorials in games and 3D spaces [Haverinen, 2014] and memorials behind QR codes on gravestones [Gotved, 2014b]), the selected articles are varied representatives of the overall central theme of online memorials related to physical death.²

The physical death is remediated online too. On the different platforms, bits and pieces from other media turn up and add their say to the whole picture. Photos, videos, personal narratives, mass media content, citations from doctors’ journals, and so on are remediated in the different online memorials. By now, remediation online as such is pivotal; we do not experience it as something special and probably are most aware of it when it is absent. Thus, and especially in the case of online memorials, remediation is crucial. It is a central way of creating and maintaining a sort of online presence for the dead, inviting others to enroll themselves in sharing and commemoration.

Even as different online platforms hold different affordances, the social media share one very important feature: they are social, meant for sharing and interaction, for presenting performances of lived life. By now we might have moved from the initial “happy go lucky” phase into a broader and more revealing phase where we share life as such—good and bad, hilarious, and annoying. This includes emotions, grief, and support, whereas the choice of technological vehicle might mean far less than the possibility of connecting to significant others.

As we shall see in the following, the different affordances of Facebook are certainly used for commemoration of dead individuals, strangers or not, and for social support for those bereaved in certain ways. As Facebook is by far the most widespread platform in the Western world (eBizMBA.com, 2014), convenience and accessibility might have a say in the choice, and furthermore, it is closely intertwined with a still growing cultural inclination for mediating and sharing the emotional importance (in this issue, Giaxoglou, Klastrup, Hård af Segerstad & Kasperowski, and Bailey et al. deal with Facebook memorials, one way or another). Despite the dominance, there are a multitude of other platforms, some of them dating back to before Facebook was even thought of. Making a dedicated memorial website can be done in different ways, and apart from portal solutions (sometimes referred to as virtual graveyards—in this issue covered by Döveling and Christensen & Sandvik), there is nothing but technological competencies that hinder the bereaved in creating their own memorial URL (examples of this are included in Bailey et al.'s cross-platform focus). YouTube offers the possibility of a video memorial or tribute (Harju's contribution looks into that) and, like a weblog (the platform for Whitehead's research), more often than not includes a field for the viewer/reader's comments, making it possible to offer support and engagement, while the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community analyzed by Faro offers an interactive platform for commemoration. Here as elsewhere, the actual platform and the affordances might mean less than the concrete possibility to connect and interact, and the articles taken together make a strong argument in that physical death and digital media are no strangers. We might just be involved in the advent of new memory practices (as Lagerkvist describes) even if the possibility of “doing grief” online seems to be attractive especially to those forms of grieving otherwise disenfranchised (this point is also made by Walter in this volume). By going online, one can sidestep the offline expectations of “fast recovery,” or perhaps the judgment of being “ridiculous,” and thus unite with like-minded people for support and understanding. This is certainly not to say that online memorials are made only for grief disregarded offline, but to highlight the fact that all the different online memorial spaces offer a lot of opportunities for communicating, remediating, and sharing the hard times of loss and bereavement.

The social and everydayish

While most people still share the mundane idea that grief's end point is to let go of the dead and move on in life, the research within death sociology (Walter, 1999), palliative care (Stroebe et al., 2005; Taubert et al., 2014), and the coping practices reflected in this Special Issue have moved toward a new and more profound understanding. Here, grief processes are not seen as a matter of “letting go of the relations to the deceased” and “moving on” but rather “keeping hold” as a basic condition for moving on. In the logic of this new paradigm, grief is an integration and reintegration process, the aim of which is to establish continuing bonds (Klass, Nickman, & Silverman, 1996; Walter, 1999) to the dead that makes it possible for the bereaved to gradually reintegrate themselves into society. This perspective implies that grieving is not allocated to a specific period of time, but instead that grieving and the related ritualizations are embedded in everyday life practices and have to be conceived of as processes rather than events that (suddenly) occur and then are over (Knudsen & Christensen, 2014; Romano, 2009). Grief and coping practices are indeed integrated in everyday life, a fact that is very clear in many of the case studies in this Special Issue. Here, small-scale (compared to institutionalized time periods of mourning) ritualizations and repetitions are central. In this light, the fact that, for example, Facebook as a social media platform hosts many death-related coping practices are related to Facebook being a very everydayish way of communicating feelings, practices, and immediate thoughts. The basic establishment of online social technologies in many people's everyday life practices might be one reason as to why death seems to be more visible and less segregated than before in modern lives.

The societal response to death and bereavement is, however, still very complex: on the one hand, death in general is still subject to silence and alienation. Even though there are changes and exceptions, many people are reluctant to talk about death and have great difficulties relating to people who have lost a loved one. On the other hand, it might seem as if the online practices of bereaved people are the forefront of new ways of performing and sharing grief that might cause Western society to move away from socially isolating and marginalizing bereaved people, through online sharing of death and pain, we move toward more socially including social spaces. This development is very apparent in the formation of various network and peer-to-peer associations and, not the least, in the establishment of online networks and sites of grief and commemoration on social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are media alive with discussions, comments, and personal recountings dealing with topics like illness, disease, death, and dying (Gustavsson, 2011; Taubert et al., 2014; Walter, 1996, 1997). As humans, we share death, loss, and grief in more visible and accessible manners than ever before, and furthermore, this sharing of death and mourning is a central example of how both offline and online practices can creatively constitute new communal spaces for designing, performing, and remediating rituals of grief and commemoration.

These practices are not discrete or segregated. Rather, they seem integrated in everyday life when it comes to the media, the materiality, and the coping rituals involved. The lifestyle and deathstyle (the ways in which we perform practices around death; see Davies, 2005; Davies & Rumble, 2012) of present day's mourners seem to coexist in very complex and intriguing ways.

In the book Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (Christensen & Willerslev, 2013), it is argued that “[d]eath is inherently social in the sense that it pre-exists us, we handle it socially and we experience death through the death of others” (Willerslev, Christensen, & Meinert, 2013, p. 5). Death is an integral part of social life, and in many, however, altered ways, death and all its related practices are a continuation of sociality (Willerslev et al., 2013).

For the sake of an overview, we might say that death is handled on at least three different social levels with a variety of gray zones and overlaps. First, the death of a known and beloved other is dealt with on an individual level. Here, mourning is about the deep personal loss and centers around a reconfiguration of the relationship to the dead. The bereaved need to reconfigure what the dead meant to him/her and what is to become of him/her in light of the loss and the new life situation without the dead person (Romano, 2009). Second, on a community level, the dead is also mourned and commemorated socially in the context of the extended network: relatives, neighbors, colleagues, and other more loosely acquainted to the dead. Third, the death of people not personally known to us generate memorial practices that relate to, for instance, their way of death (e.g. murder and traffic) or the way in which they were appreciated (e.g. celebrities) in life. Such practices illustrate the expansion of the cultural repertoire of grief and memorialization. As said, these levels are meant to provide an overview and are by no means condemning any kind of sensed loss or memorial practice. As the defining weight is put on the degree of intimate knowledge, we are in danger of reproducing patterns of disenfranchising certain forms of grief. This is by no means our intention; we acknowledge that the personal sense of loss and sorrow might be attached to, for example, persons or animals not in general accepted as legitimate reasons for grieving.

The increase in online memorial strategies in relation to death reflect that grieving processes are emotional, affective, cognitive, and intellectual but, above all, social. To socially perform and share, grief is basically a quest to reestablish life as a meaningful structure without the deceased and to heal the personal, social, and cultural gap that the death of this person has left behind.

The contributions

This Special Issue focuses on Online Memorial Culture and addresses a wide variety of grief and memorial practices, where one or more of the social levels of death are in play.

On the individual level, we include several articles on personal grief and bereavement, primarily related to parents loosing children. Ylva Hård af Segerstad and Dick Kasperowski (“A Community for Grieving: Affordances of Social Media for Support of Bereaved Parents”) present their research focused on a closed (i.e. not public) Facebook group for parents who suffered the loss of an infant. With such devastating experiences in common, the parents can support each other and find solace in the evolving community. Deborah Whitehead's case study of an American evangelical woman's blog community (“‘The story God is weaving us into’: Narrativizing grief, faith, and infant loss in U.S. evangelical women's blog communities”) has a focus on how these women are grieving infant loss and using the language of faith to find solace and offer support. Bereaved parents of stillborns and infants are also the focus for Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik (“Death ends a Life, not a relationship. Timework and ritualizations at Mindet.dk”), within the Danish portal Mindet.dk (literally, “The Memory”). Here, one can build a personal memorial, light a candle, and continue to create and uphold small rituals. Louis Bailey, Jo Bell and David Kennedy (“Continuing Social Presence of the Dead: Exploring Suicide Bereavement through Online Memorialisation”) look at parents’ loss, however, in relation to the death of older children. The cross-platform study is on parents grieving for kids lost to suicide and shows how an online memorial might be seen as a continuation of the bonds between parents and child. These four articles address one of the most feared losses in our society, and they are all rather expressive about the amount of sorrow and grief involved. At the same time, the grief's manifestation online partly moves it out of the personal space and into something more community-oriented, where sharing, peer-to-peer support, and understanding might lessen the burden just a bit.

The community level of shared remembrance and coping is pivotal in two more articles in this issue. Korina Giaxoglou (“Entextualising mourning on Facebook: stories of grief as resources for meaning-making with and for networked mourners”) looks into a single R.I.P. (Rest in Peace) Facebook page made for an American student who died a few days before graduation. The page is public and here the mourners gather and compose a shared narrative of that particular individual. Likewise, Katrin Doeveling (“Emotion Regulation in Bereavement: Searching for and Finding Emotional Support in Social Network Sites”) focuses on the co-construction of memorials, here within three German portals, where the quantitative content analysis points to patterns in the emotions shared online.

Taking a step further back and into the broader cultural memorializations surrounding death and mourning, Anu Harju (“Socially Shared Mourning: Construction and Consumption of Collective Memory”) takes a closer look at the YouTube memorial for the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. The combination of fandom and memorials are well known, and social media makes it even easier to engage in digital creation and heartfelt commemoration. A slightly different take on culturally imbued memorial activity is presented by Lisbeth Klastrup (“‘I didn't know her, but … ’: Parasocial Mourning of Mediated Deaths on Facebook R.I.P pages”), who focus on Facebook R.I.P. pages for people who died in a somehow spectacular manner. The media attention around the dead seems to attract a lot of strangers to the R.I.P. page, and thus new issues and ethical questions are abundant. Laurie Faro's study (“The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands: a meaningful, ritual place for commemoration”) on a digital monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands may be considered to reflect commemorative practices performed by individuals who are descendants from Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust, by those who have broader social relations to these victims (friends, neighbors, etc.), and/or by those dealing with history on a broader cultural level.

Moving away from the exemplary case studies, we can gain a broader perspective on significant changes in our (online) memorial culture. At the symposium in Durham, Tony Walter gave the keynote address, now remediated as the first article in this issue (“New mourners, old mourners: Online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning”). With broad strokes, he describes the history of mourning, in which online memorial culture is just a mere chapter. If not concluding that particular chapter, then at least the Special Issue, Amanda Lagerkvist (“The Netlore of the Infinite: Death (and Beyond) in the Digital Memory Ecology”) invites us into the future of memory culture. With a keen eye on the persistent presence of the infinite, she highlights how online memorial practice mirrors both an existential ambivalence and a quest for meaning.

Dorthe Refslund Christensen

PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. for Aesthetics and Communications, University of Aarhus, Denmark,

Email: [email protected]

Stine Gotved

PhD, Associate Professor, Section for Culture & Games, The IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark,

Email: [email protected]

Notes

[1] For more information on the network, visit http://deathonlineresearch.net/

[2] Physical death here as opposed to fictional death, as in the case of the 65,000 tweets to honor the death of Harry Potter's parents (Borodkina, 2014).