Chapter 8: Mourning Using Social Media: The New Frontier for Death Communication

Throughout history, death systems, or “the ways that a society organizes behavior around death and dying” (Doka, 2002, p. xii), have been dictated by culture, religion, and tradition. Today, communication is a key facet of death communication with computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies changing and dictating the ways people mourn their dead. Individuals experiencing bereavement can communicate about their grief via online support chatrooms, memorial blogs, digital memorials, virtual funerals, virtual worlds, or social networking sites (SNS). Of these, SNS allow for the greatest flexibility in death communication as they offer ways of sharing mourning information quickly, finding mourning communities, and memorializing the deceased all in one location—and over a longer period of time than traditional mourning rituals. Most computer-mediated death communication takes place on SNS, but regardless of platform the processes of grieving, moving forward, storytelling, feeling and sharing of emotions surrounding death, understanding death, and keeping the deceased's memory alive remain the same (Athen, n.d.).