Dying and Mourning in the Twittersphere

• In Event: 022 - Regular Session. Internet and Society

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate whether social media sites provide new contexts in which norms about discussing death and remembrance are evolving. Some preliminary studies suggest that social media has begun to blur the lines between private and public mourning, encouraging users to maintain continuing bonds with the deceased, and helping mourners establish community with one another. However, these early studies have primarily examined highly personalized social media spaces such as Facebook and MySpace. It is possible that the ways in which death and mourning is addressed and/or happens via social media sites varies according to the features of particular sites. In this paper, we analyze the tweet-feeds of deceased Twitter users and find that social processes surrounding death and mourning on Twitter are more diverse than early studies of social media suggest. We find that Twitter users engage in a unique blend of public and private behavior pertaining to death and mourning. While some users directly engage with the deceased and display evidence of “continuing bonds”, others use Twitter to comment on “high profile” instances of death – often connecting these deaths to other topics of interest or broad discussions of death and mortality. Overall, our findings suggest that Twitter has broadened the scope of conversations about death and remembrance in contemporary Western culture by fostering social processes that embody a blend of interpersonal and broadcast-based communication. We categorize these processes along a spectrum that ranges from highly personal, intimate communications to broadcast-based, abstracted commenting.

Authors

• Nina Cesare, University of Washington

• Jennifer Lynn Branstad, University of Washington