Online mourning

Online mourning describes grieving on the internet. It represents not a revolution in mourning, but rather a shift in the medium mourners utilize to express their grief and memorialize the deceased.[1][2] This shift has occurred in tandem with the widespread popularity of social media in the West, a result of which has been the need for users to accept death within an online environment.[2] It is estimated that by 2012, 30 million Facebook users had died.[3] Online mourning does not occur exclusively on social media websites. There are websites such as Memories.net and Legacy.com dedicated to hosting obituaries and capturing the life stories of deceased loved ones.[4] Two distinct types of online mourning have been identified, high-profile cases that draw attention from a broad online community,[5] and profiles posthumously recreated and reframed as a medium to memorialize the deceased.[1]

  1. ^ a b Carroll, Brian; Katie Landry (2010). "Logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn". Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 30 (5): 341–349. doi:10.1177/0270467610380006. S2CID 145413401.
  2. ^ a b Hogan, Bernie; Anabel Quan-Haase (2010). "Persistence and change in social media". Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 30 (5): 309–315. doi:10.1177/0270467610380012. S2CID 146515240.
  3. ^ Kaleem, Jaweed. "Death on Facebook now common as ‘death profiles’ create vast virtual cemetery", Huffington Post, 12 July 2012. Retrieved on 2 November 2014.
  4. ^ "Memories.net". Retrieved 9 May 2023.
  5. ^ Xu, Xinyuan; Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller; Bernardo Pereira Nunes (2018). "Tweets, Death and Rock 'n' Roll: Social Media Mourning on Twitter and Sina Weibo". Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science. pp. 297–306. doi:10.1145/3201064.3201079. ISBN 9781450355636. S2CID 21696086.