Orienting to Networked Grief

Abstract

Contemporary American experiences of death and mourning increasingly extend onto social network sites, where friends gather to memorialize the deceased. That "everyone grieves in their own way" may be true, but it forecloses important questions about how people evaluate these expressions, their relationship to others who are grieving, and impacts on their own experiences of grief. Drawing from mixed-methods research conducted over five years, we describe how individuals position themselves within and evaluate expressions of networked grief. We start by identifying five orientations -reinforcing, supporting, transferring, objecting, and isolating -that describe how individuals evaluate actions of grievers, position themselves relative to the network, and act when they encounter grief. We then describe factors and tensions that influence how individuals arrive at these orientations. Based on our findings, we argue that the design of social media can be sensitized to diverse needs by adopting a situated perspective within a dynamic post-mortem network.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Social media; Social networks; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Social and professional topics → User characteristics.

Digital Death and Spectacular Death

“…To study digital mourning and commemoration, scholars have developed new analytical models. For example, Moore et al (2019) discuss 'social media mourning', Brubaker et al (2019) introduce a concept of 'networked grief' to analyse certain dynamics around mourning and commemoration and Giaxoglou (2020) talks about 'hypermourning'. Characteristic of these new research models is the active role of ordinary media users in engaging with mourning and commemoration in diverse social media platforms (see also Sumiala forthcoming).…”

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…As the Internet is a space where the living and dead continue to socialize (Kasket, 2019), digital technologies are also changing the memorialization of the deceased, for example through more common appearance and thus participation of the dead in the ongoing lives of the living (Gould et al, 2019). Online memorialization has implications in several domains, for example it can facilitate coping and support (Brubaker et al, 2019; Williams & Merten, 2009) and allow freedom of speech (Williams & Merten, 2009), especially in societies prone to censorship and prohibitions (Linden, 2021). Collective online practices can also broaden the Western model of grieving dominated by individualism (Kasket, 2019), though norms around grieving arise from different cultural and social contexts and can, therefore, be conflicting in online environments (Gach et al, 2017).…”

Tools for Wellbeing-Supportive Design: Features, Characteristics, and Prototypes

“…There are a number of reasons that designing to increase positive emotions is inadequate as a strategy for supporting wellbeing. Firstly, negative emotions are important to psychological health [10][11][12] and designing to increase positive emotions will not always be appropriate [13,14]. For example, psychologists note that "under some conditions (e.g., the death of a loved one), a person would be considered to be more fully functioning, and ultimately to have greater wellbeing if they experienced rather than avoided the negative feeling of sadness" ( [15], p. 151).…”