dEATH digest

Grief and the act of grieving have been part of the human experience for as long as humans existed. From ancient tombs to online memorials, humans have had our own special ways of commemorating loss in our lives. These methods of grieving have evolved and continue to evolve as time goes by. The concept of grief has been investigated in psychology. Famously, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first identified five stages of grief in her 1969 groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. This is known through the acronym DABDA: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. According to Kubler-Ross model, one goes through each stage when grieving. Although the validity of the Kubler-Ross model is not accepted by the majority of psychological research, it has become widely accepted by the general public. Where does this model fall in terms of online presence? There hasn’t been research done specifically on the five stages of grieving manifested on social media, but there has been a substantial amount of research as to why the Internet has become relevant in our grieving processes.

 

In the last few years, online networks have been integrated into our grieving processes. In chapter 4 of Emotion, Identity, and Death: Mortality Across Disciplines, Tim Hutchings explores the ways that people publicly grieve since the rise of the Internet and social media. He argues that the study of death online should be seen as a worthwhile interdisciplinary research field. Hutchings pays attention to three main themes: “using death and mourning to improve our understanding of digital media, using online communication as a source of insight into experiences of dying and grieving, and examining the changes in the experience and practice of dying and mourning that are brought about by the integration of digital media into everyday life” (43). On the Internet there are so many opportunities for one to access resources and present themselves to the world, providing the foundation for this “network society” (Blackwell, 1996). Social media can provide a way for people to memorialize their feelings and sort of directly connect with that person they’re grieving by engaging in the same platform.

 

Hutchings did one particular case study: the public reaction to Michael Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009. The death of the King of Pop came as a shock to everyone. The news was first reported by Hollywood gossip blog TMZ and then later confirmed by the LA Times. Then it spread by ordinary people outside of the news sharing it on social media to their family and friends, who shared it with their family and friends, and so on and so forth. Within a few hours, news of Jackson’s death dominated all news and social media outlets, showing that vortextuality occurs not only in the news, but also on the Internet. It got to the point that AOL’s instant messaging service crashed, along with reported crashes and slowdowns from Facebook and Twitter. Everyone was talking about it and sharing their own personal responses. Then there was a second surge of online activity that occurred on Jackson’s memorial on July 7, 2009. For a while, Michael Jackson, despite being gone, was everywhere in the media. And the strange part was that the media did not need to conduct surveys or interviews like it did years before; people were just expressing themselves on Twitter and Facebook for the entire world to see. Researchers can now easily treat online media as sources for the study of death, mourning, and celebrity culture. In a matter of a few years, the usage of social media has only increased exponentially.

 

The idea for this site came during January 2016 when David Bowie’s sudden, unexpected death sparked online public grieving along with some controversy. Another cultural icon was lost, and all of a sudden people were only “allowed” to post kind words about Bowie. And then there were more and more tributes from those who never even met Bowie, yet were impacted by his music and persona. Why is that? We thought that was interesting, and we started to think about other ways in which people publicly grieve. This sparked us to do a few case studies in much of the same way Hutchings did about Michael Jackson.

 

The purpose of this site is multifold. This site is a somewhat of a record of one way that people grieve nowadays: through the Internet. Again, the Internet has provided a way for people everywhere to create a space and presence for themselves. In light of this space existing, it’s no wonder that people use it to express grief, especially when it’s basically a public forum and people are able to communicate with one another. More specifically, this site investigates a type of grieving more commonly associated with the Internet: grieving someone you don’t personally know. Often, when a famous person dies, people react to it through social media; usually these come in the form of “R.I.P. _____” with many emojis or words about what that person’s work meant to them. This type of reaction has also been shown to extend to fictional characters. The concept of grieving someone you never actually personally knew puts people at an interesting position of grief and loss. This site aims to provide a small record of some cases of this. It also provides several resources for coping with loss and exploring the concept of death in our society.