DEATH IN THE DIGITAL ERA: GRIEVING ON FACEBOOK

Contemporary Studies Programme: Honours Thesis DEATH IN THE DIGITAL ERA: GRIEVING ON FACEBOOK By: Rebecca Hussman Adviser: Dr. Kierans Due: Friday, March 7, 2014. ! ! Abstract: This paper seeks to highlight that the practices of mourning online are not so strange as one might initially believe them to be, because historically, mourning has been practiced on a public level more often than one intuitively thinks. Think, for example, of the televised, public memorials of famous persons who have died (from royalty such as Princess Diana to pop star legends such as Michael Jackson). Using the media analysis tools offered by Marshall McLuhan, the author argues that viewing mourning on a public forum like the internet as inappropriate, odd, or off-putting is a symptom of the rationale of a previous era, in which mourning strictly entails private expressions of grief and only the company of the immediate family. This old rationale is in line with Freud’s cannon, especially concerning his essay Mourning and Melancholia (1917), which originally described healthy mourning as a process in which the mourner must detach themselves from the deceased and essentially replace them and move on. Thoughts of these kind which belong to and are applicable in the previous era are no longer coherent. Surely, having a set of beliefs which are no longer appropriate in the current age can cause problems navigating the complex technology-laden twenty-first century climate, and indeed, can prevent an understanding of how our engagements with technological media shape and reshape social practices around the world. The author provides a more fruitful approach to viewing the new practices of the digital era so as to better understand the motivations and potential benefits such practices may have. This includes newer conceptions of mourning, as offered by Butler (2001), Walter (1996) and Klass, Silverman and Nickman (2006), which emphasize healthy practices of grief to be perpetual, allowing the bereaved to incorporate the deceased within his or her ongoing life. If this approach is taken, the tendencies pertaining to how people deal with death online are much more comprehensible, for one’s Facebook account may remain after one dies, forcing strategies of mourning to adapt and become ongoing. Turning to online social media platforms such as Facebook to grieve and mourn is a rising trend which has changed the face of bereavement studies as a whole, pointing to the important clinical, social and psychological issues which are pressing for the future of communication studies, as well as for grief and loss counselling. ! !Key Words: death, grief, mourning, loss, bereavement, continuing bonds, biography, profile, internet, digital, technology, Facebook, community, communication, norms, perception. !2 Introduction The transition from the media of the previous age, such as print and radio technology, to the technological media in the digital age, has been the source of much anxiety and bewilderment for many who have witnessed the transformation. Yet as Marshall McLuhan proves in the corpus of his works, this reaction of distress to the increase in pace and proximity initiated by the connecting power of digital or electric media need not occur. If one takes the time to carefully study and understand the media which are at the heart of these dramatic social changes, one gains a general, more meaningful understanding of the relations human beings have with it, historically and currently. For as McLuhan himself puts it (1964): “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms” (The Medium is the Message, 69). The media-saturated environment of the twenty-first century, then, by virtue of the new media and technology becoming more pervasive around the world, has functioned to change the way we experience and perceive the world. Because it changes the way we behave, certain social norms and cultural traditions have been called into question. However, we must view the changes in patterns of behaviour in a non-judgmental way, trying to genuinely evaluate whether any of these changes have been positive or not for those involved. This paper shall explore the social norms which have been re-articulated as a result of the introduction and increasing usage of digital technological media, most notably, the internet. Specifically, the author focuses on the shift on behaviour surrounding death, as users turn to the internet to express grief. The traditional norms pertaining to mourning are backed by an ideology of grief that conceives of appropriate expressions of grief to be only when one is alone, urging expressions of grief to stay inward. Naturally, turning to the internet for a new way to express !3 grief, on an obviously very public and socially rich platform, challenges these once sanctioned norms around mourning, forming a site of contention worthy of academic study and more future research. Rituals of bereavement are a helpful area of study when seeking to analyze the social and cultural patterns of one’s time, for they adapt and accommodate to a community’s social and cultural climate, which is in turn shaped by the current dominant media form. In this case, we shall be investigating first the socio-cultural climate of the present day, discussing themes related to internet use and some key motivations regarding the usage of Facebook. Second, we shall go over what the process of mourning entails traditionally and presently, since current practices of grief being which are mediated by the internet are more frequently occurring. Following this, there shall be a discussion about the implications of this new trend of grieving online; first on an individual level, how dealing with death affects the user phenomenologically and psychologically, citing interviews and reports from various studies; second, how dealing with death online is part of a larger socio-cultural shift in patterns of human behaviour instantiated by digital media. Finally, there will be a short discussion about what changes in perception one might undergo as a result of learning some of the facts included in this paper. ! The Internet Era: The Digital Age of Information Community nowadays is based on a common shared culture put in place by electric technology, most notably, the internet. Picking up on this, Paul Levinson (1999) argues in his work The Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium that “the internet made an honest metaphor out of the global village [as articulated by McLuhan] - or rather, converted it !4 from a metaphor to something much closer to a depiction of reality” (66). For though the internet had not yet existed, McLuhan noticed that the newest media of his time, television, instantiated a kind of culture which was inclusive on a new scale, in that it turned all television watchers into a new sort of “village”. As Levinson puts it, television created a “village of voyeurs” (69). Compared with the simple, one-way communication of the radio, which offers the singular mode of sense-data (sound) and emphasizes centrality, electric media such as television and, similarly, the internet, illicit a more complex experience. Like television, the internet requires audio-visual reception and is all-consuming, compelling the viewer to immerse themselves completely in that world which is being presented to them. As Levinson writes, “in television viewing, ‘illuminations project themselves at the viewer’ (Carpenter & McLuhan, 1960, p. x) - the television becomes the projector and the viewer becomes the movie screen” (96). Thus one’s engagement with computer and television screens are similar to the extent that the screen “becomes the projector and the viewer becomes the movie screen;” they are consuming, involving, effectively transforming the viewer into a screen. Yet they differ because the internet takes it one step further. The internet gives the user what television only teased the viewer about: it gives the user the direct ability to engage with it, to touch or affect it back. This is because electric technology tends to need our intervention to function, as well as to evolve, meaning that we change it and it changes us in various ways over time. McLuhan and Fiore (1967) put it as follows: “Our new [electric] environment compels commitment and participation” (The Medium is the Massage, 24). The internet is there, but it is only ever being used if we take the steps to log online and engage with it, to explore it, and perhaps even publish content on it. Having such a relationship with the digital media in this way !5 dissolves our separateness from said media, in a sense, and effectively turns all of us into a culture of participants, into one global community with relatively the same access to the same online spaces. The metaphor of the global village, then, becomes fulfilled to an even deeper extent with the advent of the internet because these villagers of the global village are no longer just voyeurs, as was the case before with television, but they interact with each other like members of traditional villages would. According to Levinson, “the fulfillment of the interactive aspect of the global village via the internet and the world wide web was pointed to, suggested, predicted by McLuhan’s initiating metaphor” (28-9). Thus even though he did not live to see the fulfillment of his predictions in the digital age, the internet has come to fulfill the global village metaphor to an extent that McLuhan would most likely not have been unable to foresee, rendering it no longer a metaphor, but an accurate depiction of reality. With digital media as its backbone, the twentyfirst century climate is one of globalization, hyper-connectivity, overstimulation, and information overload. It has come to change patterns of social behaviour, re-articulating certain social norms so as to have them better accommodate this new climate. McLuhan says that in the digital age, “information gathering resumes the inclusive concept of ‘culture’” (The Medium is the Message, 155): we are all now members of a worldwide, homogenized digital culture with access to the same online databases of information, and with several sites which are designed to facilitate frequent and easy communication with others who are present online. Our world now is truly “a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else” (McLuhan and Fiore, 61), as a result of the connecting power of digital technology. Thus, thanks to the internet, we moderns have !6 come to know far much more about not only the world’s historical and current events, but also about each other. One major consequence of the connecting power of electric technology is that it has “reconstituted dialogue on a global scale” and, in doing so, it “pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men” (McLuhan and Fiore, 16). We are, by virtue of digital media, able to be more deeply involved with the details of others’ lives, and by the same token, we are also able to give more details about our own lives to those we connect ourselves to via social networking sites like Facebook. Simply put: “Too many people know too much about each other” (McLuhan and Fiore, 24), and that is changing the way we relate with each other and deal with certain issues, such as those involving death. ! Facebook Usage: Motivations The major reason internet users are willingly submitting detailed information about themselves online, and are learning details about others, has a lot to do with the trend of creating an online profile. The construction of an online profile on social networking sites has been commonly referred to in research as the construction of the “virtual” or “digital self” (Zhao et al., Identity Construction on Facebook, 1831), contrasting it with the offline self that creates it. Yet, as we shall see, the distinction between a “digital self” and a “real” or “true” self is questionable, for the engagements one has online have very real, often immediate and intense effects on the user. Perhaps that is part of why the trend of creating online profiles is so widespread and became so popular so rapidly: it has affected noticeable changes in the way we live our lives, individually and socially, forcing people to keep up with this evolution.“The number of Facebook users has grown exponentially, from 30 million in July 2007 (Cashmore, 2007) to over !7 800 million users in March 2012” (Forman et al., Death and Mourning as Sources of Community Participation in Online Social Networks, n.p.). Thus more and more users are signing up to Facebook and creating profiles, irregardless of their age: it is not just for youths and students anymore. The only stipulation for internet and thus Facebook use is if one is affluent enough to have internet connection, and with regards to maintenance and upkeep of the profile, that one has this access on a regular basis. In a fairly recent study (2008), it is shown that those who face various social obstacles (from cognitive impairments, to speech-related issues such as stuttering) are able to “actualize the identities they hope to establish but are unable to in face-to-face situations” (Zhao et al., 1819). Thus engaging with one’s Facebook Friends can result in empowerment for certain “gated individuals” (1819), facilitating greater overall human flourishing for the users involved. In other words, online profiles are creations which “can serve to enhance the users' overall self-image and identity claims and quite possibly increase their chances to connect in the offline world" (1831-2). What Zhao et al. are among the first to prove in their study on virtual identity construction is the idea that what happens in the virtual world can have a direct, positive effect on what occurs in the offline world. Surely this is one acceptable motive for engaging with Facebook: it can empower those who face various social obstacles, and even help such persons to take the steps needed to overcome them. Zhao et al. (2008) argue that the positive effects of Facebook use as experienced by its users has to do with the general idea that “identities are what we convince others to think of us as; it matters not whether that happens online or offline" (1832). !8 The author argues in line with Zhao et al. that the distinction between the online and offline identity is problematic at best, and can be especially misleading when the terms are accompanied by the adjectives “true” and “false” respectively. The rest of this paper shall discuss online behaviour in the same manner as if it were offline behaviour, challenging the assumption that the two worlds and identities are separate, and disagreeing with the idea that one identity is more “real” than the other. Rather, arguing alongside McLuhan, the author views all technology and media as “extensions of ourselves” (The Medium is the Message, 23) which have “altered sense ratios or patterns of perceptions steadily” (33), both on an individual and collective scale. One study (2012) agrees with this point, and puts it this way: “Cyberspace in general, and social networking sites in particular, have rapidly evolved into extensions of our human bodies, opening up new possibilities for us to be with one another in the digital world (Kim, 2001)” (Kasket, Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking, 62). It is this new way of being with others via digital technology that the author focuses on, and further, how occurrences of death bring these relations to the fore. Death, as “one great common denominator of humankind” (Kern et al., R.I.P. Remain in Perpetuity: Facebook Memorial Pages, 3), illuminates the general importance of the relationships we have with others when it comes to our own wellbeing, pointing to “the social nature of death” (Brubaker et al., Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning, 161). On this vein, “[o]ne respondent said he or she believed that ‘the greatest appeal to Facebook groups is that no one ones to grieve alone,’ while another said Facebook offers ‘a community where they can grieve in a ‘safe place’” (Carroll and Landry, 348). ! !9 ! Facebook Usage: Mourning As one might already realize, the Facebook platform is especially helpful for mourners. For one thing, it is an incredible community builder; it “enables new types of relationships with both people and content across time, geographical spaces, and social contexts”. (Brubaker et al., 161). Thus an extremely compelling motivation for Facebook use is when a user is during a time of mourning, because the integral role of others’ support during such times can be met to a greater, more consistent extent than with traditional strategies for grief, like attending a wake or funeral procession. The interactions with the online grieving community can be facilitated with relative ease at basically any time, and they can be ongoing, possibly for the rest of one’s life. Moreover, social networking sites like Facebook “may benefit marginalized grievers (e.g., those outside the family) by providing access to a space for mourning” (Brubaker et al., 160), and thereby Facebook generally “‘mitigates disenfranchised grief’ (Martin 2010, 37)” (154). It allows anyone to express their grief to a large number of people all at once by posting online, or even by not posting anything at all and simply reading the posts of the community of mourners who are sharing in one’s grief, which offers comfort, support and consolation to the bereaved. Thus, far more than just for helping us cope with the increasingly pervasive technology we have come to rely on in the digital era and to help organize our relationships in this information-saturated era, internet and Facebook usage have come to serve us in very important ways that one typically does not take notice of. It is about far more than self-expression and social networking, as the rest of this paper hopes to show. The new patterns of behaviour enacted by our habitual !10 engagements with digital media, namely the internet, have come to re-define the norms surrounding death and mourning. There is a rather large body of research devoted to the topic of mourning online, since expressions of grief have been published on the internet as early as the MySpace era. To be clear, this era was before the turn of the century, before Facebook emerged on the scene in 2004 and quickly won the battle of popularity1. In fact, the term “virtual cemeteries” was first used in an academic study published in 1995, according to one study done in 2010 (Carroll and Landry, 342). Interestingly, this study reports that these “virtual cemeteries” and their surrounding communal grief practices bear more resemblance to non-Western models of grief than those typical of the West (343), because they are so inclusive, intimate and public all at once. Due to the social taboos and anxiety surrounding the topic of death and its history of privatization, Western models of grief typically include small, private communities of mourners, who when in public, tend to don large sunglasses and hats to hide one’s face, not wanting to show one’s distress and outpouring of emotion. Accordingly, websites like Facebook are, for many, coming to be the preferred platform on which to grieve, for it provides great benefits to the users during such times. Notably, “this positive impact does not vary by age” (344). Several participants in one study (2010) report “feeling that the support they found online was more valuable than that offered by traditional support groups” (Carroll and Landry, 347). What is so valuable about online support? Well, for one thing, although a grieving individual 1 Another interesting fact which Carroll and Landry discuss is that MySpace has always been equipped with a way of dealing with the profiles of users who have passed away, creating sites which are “devoted to memorializing deceased MySpace users” (343), such as Yourdeathspace.com and MyDeathSpace.com. MyDeathSpace.com in particular is of interest, for it “aggregates links to the pages of deceased MySpace users, along with stories, obituaries, and blogs that detail their lives and how they died (Debatty, 2007)” (Logging On and Letting Out, 342-343). !11 may be communicating with more than one person online at a time, they are still able to be in a private space. This makes users eligible to express their grief without the pressures of being in company, for they are typically alone when logging online or at least in a private setting, which lets them benefit from the support offered by the online community without restraint. In a way, they still are able to incorporate the private aspect of traditional norms on grieving behaviour, yet they simultaneously undermine these norms by posting on such a public space and engaging with a virtual audience that has international scope. The author focuses on the practices of mourning done via Facebook specifically in this paper because it is a particularly interesting site of discourse, and it is the most popular social network site to date. According to Carroll and Landry’s study (2010), members spend on Facebook “an estimated 10 billion minutes per day” (341), taking into account the numerous times users visit the site per day. A more recent study (2013) backs up these claims, stating that “Facebook is now the most popular website in the world based on unique visitors [and has] attracted at least 35% of all web users” (Kern et al., 2). All this means that Facebook is an ideal space to analyze behaviour patterns and trends which are current, as well as for measuring how our engagements with the online world have already started to change the ways in which we, as citizens of the twenty-first century, act in and see the world. ! Public Mourning and Digital Media The author seeks to emphasize that online bereavement practices are not so strange as one may initially intuit them to be, because for one thing, mourning has been practiced on a public level more often than one may recall, despite the existing traditional norms of mourning which !12 encourage privacy. Think, for example, of the televised, public memorials of famous persons who have died, from royalty such as Princess Diana, to military soldiers given broadcasted ceremonial burials, to pop star legends such as Michael Jackson2, and the massive gatherings which occur at these types of renowned figures’ funerals. All of these types of deaths initiate an outpouring of grief shared by mass quantities of people all over the world, on a very public level. Think, too, of monuments and shrines put in spaces in order to commemorate a death which occurred at that very location. By virtue of being in public, communal places, these monuments are surely public acts of memorialization which is shared by all who have encounters with the monuments, even if it is only for a brief moment as one is driving by it. Think, also, of the memorialization which occurs for several people at once, such as of those who perished during the attacks on the United States’ Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, or those who were victims of the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007 (Carroll and Landry, 342). Events like these facilitated reactions of grief that were publicized in more sense than one, for expressions of mourning were shared via television, photography, videography and radio broadcasting. As Harold Innis (1950) writes: “The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the media, and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media” (Empire and Communication, n.p.). Like Innis says here, trying to appraise the media of the digital age when one is used to the means of appraisal offered by the previous age is difficult and frustrating, because that means of appraisal is no longer effective. Hence, a “change in the type of medium implies a change in the 2 For more on Jackson’s death and reactions of grief mediated by the internet, see J. Sanderson and P. Hope Cheong’s article: "Tweeting Prayers and Communicating Grief Over Michael Jackson Online." Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30.5 (2010): 328-40. Web. !13 type of appraisal” (Innis, n.p.), which is something one must learn. One cannot coherently assess the present situation with tools, concepts and views of the past; one must try to adjust one’s perspective accordingly with an open mind, understanding the fact that introductions of new media produce significant social and cultural changes in order to accommodate the new technology. Yet the changes enacted by the transformation to digital media as the predominant media, and the global affects enacted by internet technology, have been quite drastic, making it harder for individuals to understand the media behind these changes, let alone to endorse them. As part of the shift in human affairs affected by electric media, those raised in the digital era found it the next logical step to turn to the familiar zone of the online world to express sentiments of grief, thereby creating a new and “unique form of communal discourse” (Carroll and Landry, 342). Engaging with the online community, which has been extended farther than that of the traditional funeral gathering, can be extremely helpful for those who are in periods of mourning to lend support and give comfort during such a difficult time. Since there have always been public memorials in the offline world (especially for famous persons and tragic, sudden deaths), it is no surprise then that there is such a prevalence of publicly constituted memorial pages online. Such online memorial pages offer individual comfort and at the same time, and a means for collective mourning, providing communal support. Moreover, a significant reason why mourners tend to prefer Facebook usage over more traditional ways of expressing grief is because they can have an ongoing means of communicating with the deceased by virtue of the deceased’s remaining Profile. The bereaved can send messages to the deceased on Facebook in ways that can feel quite direct, such as private Inbox messages or public Wall posts. ! !14 Traditional Views of Mourning: Freud At this point it is important to discuss what mourning and grief-work entails. In one of his earlier texts, Sigmund Freud (1917) writes on the subject from a psychological perspective, and due to the widespread influence of Freudian thought and theory in the twentieth century, traces of his conception can still be felt in a lot of attitudes still held today. First, providing a simple definition, Freud writes: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Mourning and Melancholia, 243). Thus, as one might agree, mourning entails a profound period of sadness which follows a significant loss, a loss that is usually of a loved one, but can also be of something more abstract which is just as deeply significant to the person. Freud then continues to describe mourning by comparing its symptoms to that of melancholia, arguing that the “disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same” (244). According to Freud, these same features which are present in both conditions are “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, [and an] inhibition of all activity” (244). Now, melancholia is commonly known as and medically classified as clinical depression, and its symptoms and treatment options are more widely recognized and understood by the general public. Thus, Freud is right to say that in periods of mourning, one becomes filled with the symptoms that are typical of depression. It is easy to see that during a time when one might not have it in him or her to physically leave the comfort of one's own home and interact with others in person, seeking solace online becomes an appealing and satisfying strategy of grief. It allows one to fulfill his or her responsibilities pertaining to mourning, that is, to connect with the deceased as well as the !15 surrounding community of grievers, without the usual emotional and anxious feelings one experiences when communicating face-to-face. The internet medium thus acts a kind of digital buffer, making these types of actions much easier for people to do, especially during high-stress, vulnerable times. Freud also notes that when one is grieving, the mourner must struggle to come to terms with reality which has now drastically been changed in a rather disturbing way, for their life suddenly no longer contains the precious person (or thing or idea) that has been lost in it. Crucially, Facebook can help the griever come to terms with this loss in a very uniquely effective way. That is not to say, however, that Facebook makes the work of grief easy. All who have grieved at one point in their life know well the painful feeling of emptiness which accompanies a significant loss, one that cannot be filled quickly (or perhaps even at all), and the lengthy period of struggle one must go through to adjust. It is, as we know, incredibly emotionally, psychologically and spiritually draining to perform “the work which mourning performs” (Freud, 244). As Becker and Knudson (2003) suggest, “mourning is a responsibility, a ‘heroic act’ (p. 713), a need to carry on memories of the life of the person, particularly if that life affected the mourner in a positive and meaningful way” (Kern et al., 3). Thus it is about the survivor’s need to cope with the loss and develop the ability to carry on with his or her life, instead of allowing pathological symptoms of a more serious life-interrupting depression to arise; but also it is about paying respects to the deceased. The work of mourning is, in part, showing to the other survivors how much the deceased person meant to them while alive, and still means to them while no longer living. In addition, the work involves paying respects to that individual via actions of grief, acting in their honour, as if the deceased were able to perceive that the bereaved are performing this work for their sake. To put !16 it another way, these acts of mourning show that “‘we are also responding to the expectation of the dead that we pay attention to them, that we honor them or simply notice what is happening to them’” (Kern et al., 3). And in mourning, indeed we are thinking of the deceased often, having to face things in our daily lives that remind us of them, and of our loss. One major reason this is so difficult is because it forces us to cope with the fact that what has been lost is physically gone, permanently. That is why having a trace of the deceased left within the non-physical, online space of the Facebook can be so helpful when it comes to coping with a loss: it can remain after the deceased passes away, and can therefore aid with the transition to one’s new life without any remaining physical presence of the deceased. In mourning, Freud contends that the mourner must respond to reality’s constant “demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment to that object” (244), acknowledging all the tangible connections to the deceased are now ties only preserved in memory, which is a very arduous process that is “carried out piecemeal” (245). After this timeconsuming, painful work of mourning is “completed,” Freud argues, “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (245). This sums up the traditional model of mourning as initially proposed by Freud (1917): the process is like an emotional journey with a set goal and endpoint, namely, that one eventually becomes “healed” by cutting all their ties to the deceased, rather than holding onto them in an unhealthy way which Freud (1935) later refers to as “‘narcissistic identification’” (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 370). As one recent study (2010) notes, this conception of mourning is “a 20th century phenomenon” which is of course due to the influence of Freud, for according to his original publications, he posits that to cling to one’s !17 connection to the deceased is “pathological,” and that it is of more importance “to invest one’s energies fully into other things, other relationships” (Kasket, 63)3. ! Traditional Views of Mourning: Problems Though problematic for suggesting such dis-attachment, which intuitively sounds suspicious and is probably not entirely possible at least on an emotional level, it still points to the fact that if handled poorly, mourning can have devastating psychological affects on the individual. The emotional pain experienced during this time is so profound it has the power to quite literally undo someone, to send them into a kind of pathological condition or depression. As Freud says in a rather surprisingly candid comment in Mourning and Melancholia: “It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us,” and why mourning “should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics” (245). The fact is, however, that the struggles involved with grieving are accepted as undeniably difficult, and there is no one set method of expressing one’s grief. Rather, it is up to every individual, whose behaviour should be guided only by what makes them the most comfortable and help them to feel better. As electric and digital media affect social and cultural changes by generally making things more integrated, interconnected, and in a state of interplay, the social norms dictating what is “acceptable” mourning are being affected accordingly. Rather than being a process with a 3 It must be noted that later, Freud changed his mind of the subject of mourning. As Judith Butler writes, “he later claimed [in The Ego and the Id (1923)] that incorporation, originally associated with melancholia, was essential to the task of mourning” (Violence, Politics, Mourning, 21).This means he comes to abandon the view of mourning which posits ‘healthy’ mourning as exchanging one attachment for another. Yet the effects of his first definition of mourning still rippled within the sphere of the social sciences, evident in such conceptions as Kubler-Ross’s Stage Theory (1969). The Stage Theory’s “acceptance” stage posits a similar idea of substitution which is needed to ‘successful’ mourning. !18 linear trajectory in which the individual goes through particular stages of grief, such as KublerRoss’s (1969) conception of the five stages “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance” (Brubaker et al., 153), modern day mourning has become to be seen as more of an ongoing process, social process. For as the author argues, alongside recent researchers of bereavement, “mourning periods often do not reach a distinct ending point” (Brubaker et al., 158), and moreover, the ways individuals are continuously engaging with the representations of the deceased, and their respective mourning communities, online, help illustrate that mourning is most helpful when it is an ongoing or unending process. As such, one does not ever really have to stop acquiring comfort from the community online; it is up to every individual when and how often to mourn. According to one study (2013), “researchers have begun to engage with death as a novel site for understanding how people relate to technology” (Brubaker et al., 154). That is, studying the patterns of behaviour regarding digital media use for death-related issues shows how technology may or may not have changed the ways in which people tend deal with death. To be sure, digital technology has radically altered the way in which people have come to grieve, and has thereby changed the mentality and know-how of bereavement care specialists. Clearly, then, Freud and Kubler-Ross’ conceptions of mourning, as previously discussed, will have to be altered or added on to so as to better fit within the social and cultural climate that has been established via digital media. For when profiles of the deceased remain online, mourning never really ends in the sense that Freud and Kubler-Ross argue it should. ! Contemporary Views of Mourning: Butler !19 Mourning reveals human beings in their most vulnerable of states, while bringing out the profoundly meaningful ties one has to others, and how one’s well-being depends so much on one’s live connections to others. As Judith Butler puts it, “one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes, one will be changed, possibly forever. […] There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned” (Violence, Politics, Mourning, 21). The ties we have to others run so deep that the transformation we undergo as a result of a loss is out of our control, for “this experience of transformation reconstitutes choice at some level” (21). Just as we are exposed to others by virtue of our corporeality, or of being housed by our bodies which are vulnerable to the force of others, we are always exposed to others in an emotional and psychological way, and the effects of these ties we have are only ever really fully understood when one tie is broken, that is, when one person we are tied to dies. Thus studying those who are dealing with death has come to be an important way to increase our understanding of human beings’ attitudes and behaviours in general. And if the digital era is, in a way, characterized by how we relate to digital technology, the most effective way to study these relations is to approach it through the lens of death. It must be noted that part of the problem with insisting on grief work having “a distinct ending point” has to do with the fact that it implies one simply gets over the deceased, that they essentially forget their ties to them with the motivation of moving on with one’s life and eventually replacing the deceased. As Butler phrases it, this idea of mourning is formulated “as if full substitutability were something for which we might strive” (21), yet this economy of substitutability is appropriate only for the realm of objects, not for subjects or living beings. It enshrouds the deceased with an aspect of “interchangeability” (21), which is not only !20 disrespectful toward another human being’s agency and subjectivity, but it is also not adequately representative of just how much that person who has been lost truly meant (and, in memory, still means) to the bereaved. As previously mentioned, the ties we have to others are fundamental to our very existence and being, and we only come to assume the identities we have by virtue of our interactions and presence among others. Put in another way, the existence of our identities necessarily depends on whether or not others acceptance of them as such. Therefore, when someone we are closely tied to dies, the utter meaningfulness of our connection to them, and to others in general, is brought to the fore, revealing how integral these ties are for us when it comes to our overall sense of self. Our relationships with other individuals, then, cannot be treated within an economy that usually pertains to objects, which is what is happening when one believes that a person can be simply replaced by another. As Judith Butler eloquently puts it: “I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place” (21). Further challenging the notion of grief having a finishing point, she says: “I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being” (20). As a brilliant philosopher famous for her seminal contributions to gender and political theory, Butler is anything but lost on the nature in which individuals are always inexplicably tied to each other, always exposed and vulnerable to one another, and is therefore very mindful about how crucial our relationships with others are for our wellbeing. That is why she has so much insight into what it truly is like, phenomenologically, to mourn. Butler says that when we undergo processes of mourning, “something about who we are [is] revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties !21 constitute what we are” (22). Therefore, when one loses someone, one inevitably loses a part of one’s self. Butler, referencing a Freudian idea, adds that “when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost” (21). Surely what has been lost within that person becomes inscrutable and “enigmatic” (21) to us because it is very much a part of our identity which perishes with the deceased, and this can be a rather difficult thing to understand and accept. Butler poetically puts the matter in this helpful way: “I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? […] On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well” (22). Hence, part of why the work of mourning is so arduous, time-consuming, and difficult is because one is literally trying to recover from losing a part of oneself, a type of spiritual injury one must work to recuperate from. Clearly, then, turning to the support of others within a community is crucial during this time of mourning, for one undoubtedly benefits from the comfort of belonging to a group who are also, at the same time, coming to terms with this newly altered sense of themselves, and about the world which no longer has their beloved in it. Having a community to share one’s grief with, then, in order to help one go through the process, serves to reiterate the idea that there exists no one single individual who is unconnected to others, literally by virtue of technology, but also ontologically. One’s existence is fundamentally relational; one’s connections with others is an ontological precondition for one’s existence in the first place, for one’s essence to be constituted. “Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all” (20), as Butler phrases it. That is why grief is a helpful avenue to study when one hopes to understand the notion of community in the digital age on a deeper level, because these underlying ties that we have to others are felt in a more intense way than ever due to digital !22 technology’s intimate connecting power. As McLuhan says, digital or electric technology “extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace” (The Medium is the Message, 91), giving us eyes and ears around the world. ! Contemporary Views of Mourning: The Biography In the digital age, it is becoming more widely known that healthy methods of grief as originally prescribed by Freud (1917) and Kubler-Ross (1969) have substantial shortcomings, in that neither allows for any ongoing integration of the deceased into the survivor’s lives. Instead, they suggest the deceased should be forgotten, exchanged or replaced, as Butler touches on. More recently, Walter (1996) responds to this problem and proposes that grief is a process in which one must come up with an account of the deceased’s life, for this work serves to help one come to terms with the loss. Crucially, this does not suggest that the mourner ought to try and withdraw his or her energies and ties to the lost person, as Freud (1917) initially proposes. Rather, “to construct a durable biography” of the deceased is a process which “allows the survivors to continue to integrate the deceased person into their lives and to find a stable and secure place for them” (Kasket, 67). Immediately, this newer understanding of healthy grief strikes a connection to the digital community, where deceased individuals’ Profiles are not replaceable and often outlive the deceased person. A remaining online Profile of the deceased can give mourners a way to integrate a very real part of the deceased into the rest of their lives as they see fit. Further, with regards to Walter’s (1996) idea of constructing a biography, Facebook Profiles are autobiographies of the individual, providing the bereaved with this already formed, !23 authentic self-representation from the deceased, allowing them to reference it for coherence and accuracy while they undergo the task of formulating a biography of their own. The image of the deceased, then, as represented and displayed on their Facebook Profile, becomes imbued with an element of “ongoing accessibility” (Kasket, 63) which had never been possible before. As one study (2012) notes, “the image of the deceased builds in complexity and becomes more multifaceted, more detailed, more vivid” (Kasket, 66) as those who are connected to them online add their own personal anecdotes to the public profile. “Wall posts frequently refer to how much more the writer now feels they understand or know about the deceased person from the community’s recollections and from engagement with all of the photographs and other elements posted” (67). This quotation helps to illustrate the point that grief is best and most satisfactorily achieved in community-based settings, for the comments, photographs and posts left by others actually give the mourner a more vivid and complete overall picture of who the deceased was when he or she was alive. The lasting digital self, or a Profile which remains online after the user has died, allows for surviving users to continually engage with the deceased in a way that can be meaningful and satisfying. It is a more meaningful way of trying to communicate with the deceased than traditional methods, such as writing a letter to them (and not sending it), because one actually sends these messages somewhere, to a place which the deceased used to be present and receive them. Plus, the nature of Profile is dynamic, changing; it is not literally set in stone as with gravestones, reminding grievers rather harshly of the absoluteness and physical finality of the death. Rather, the nature of the digital medium takes the emphasis off of the physical and onto the emotional or spiritual plane, which is especially conducive for healthy expressions of !24 mourning. In addition, as previously mentioned, the digital nature of the Profile allows survivors to continually communicate with the community surrounding the deceased individual, so comfort and solace are always there for the taking. ! Contemporary Views of Mourning: Continuing Bonds A more recent account of mourning, which fits well with these relatively new trends of online grieving, has been provided by Klass, Silverman and Nickman (2006), known as the Continuing Bonds Theory. Continuing Bonds Theory posits that to try and establish an absolute “end” with regards to one’s relationship to the deceased is hardly the best way to grieve or handle the death of a loved one. Instead, they suggest to focus on, as the title of the theory suggests, continuing one’s bond with the deceased. They argue that “while relationships necessarily do change, they do not end as such, and that this can be normal, adaptive and comforting” (Kasket, 63). Like developing the biography as Walter (1996) proposes, for Continuing Bonds Theory, developing an “inner representation of the deceased” is a necessary part of the grieving process for it allows the survivor to “maintain a link or even develop a new relationship postmortem” (Brubaker et al., 153). In contrast to traditional models, this type of mourning encourages the maintenance of a bond with the deceased that is “dynamic and ongoing” (153), and Facebook’s digital make-up and preserving functions allows for this “dynamic and ongoing” bond with the deceased to occur. It is also important that the survivors are engaging with the image of the deceased person as he or she constructed it themselves, not as a new form of them, as is the case with eulogized representations offered by traditional death-workers in a cemetery or obituary posting. Further, as !25 Martin (2010) draws attention to: “Because arriving at a singular identity for the deceased is not possible, survivors must negotiate the challenges presented by alternative narratives. This identity work provides ‘a vehicle for reconstructing, rehabilitating, and maintaining a postmortem identity in collective memory’” (Brubaker et al., 154), just as it reassures the mourner that their biography of the deceased is accurate and justified in being held on to as a way of incorporating the deceased into the rest of one’s daily life. As Brubaker et al. put it, “Facebook’s very ‘everydayness’ enables an expansion of grief into others aspects of life” (156), allowing (a part of) the deceased to be accessible at any time, from virtually any place, during any day. Thus the “everydayness” of Facebook and the presence of the deceased’s Profile on it allows the deceased to be included in one’s ongoing life, not left behind and attempted to be forgotten or replaced, but preserved as a digitally facilitated bond in this way. It is interesting to consider that, as one study puts it, “in an increasingly secular society there is still belief in an afterlife” for trends regarding mourning have begun to focus on the post-mortem bond, or the continuing bond. Thus, despite one’s existent or non-existent religious beliefs, as one study (2013) puts it: “The dead never really die; but rather are perpetually sustained in a digital state of dialogic limbo” (Kern et al., 3). This, as mentioned, allows for mourners to send messages directly to the deceased in a satisfying way, and this communication has a sense of directness which is newfound. Indeed, many interviewees in several studies comment on the importance of the remaining profiles of the deceased to them during periods of grief immediately after the death occurs, and during sometimes even during the rest of their lifetime. Illustrating this, one participant in a study (2012) even went so far as to say that if the profile of the deceased were to be taken down, it would be like the deceased actually dying for a !26 second time: “‘I would be close to inconsolable [were his profile to be taken down]. Having something that may seem so small to some people is everything to me. [His profile] is one last thread of him that I have. If we lost it, it would be like losing him all over again’” (Kasket, 66). I Similarly, in a different study (2010), one participant reports “being so ‘heartbroken’ that they wanted to share thoughts with the deceased person to let him or her know how much he or she meant to them,” and as this study points out, this type of communication is “an activity or expression similar in some ways to prayer” (Carroll and Landry, 348). Therefore mourners communicating directly with the deceased may not believe that the deceased person is actually receiving the messages or communicating back (though, in some cases, some participants do report believing in such things4). Despite this issue of receiving a response, the communication directed toward the deceased in this digitally mediated way is still very real, and should be looked at as a secular expression similar to that of prayer, as proposed above. Just like people of religious orientations are able to pray at any time, people who have access to the Profile of the deceased can view it and send messages to it, privately or publicly, at any time, not just during periods of mourning which immediately follow the death. 4 In Kasket’s study (2012), one participant is quoted saying, for example: “‘It’s strange but part of me just feels like he sees it somehow. When I’m communicating with him on Facebook, there isn’t that immediate reminder that he’s gone” (Continuing Bonds, 66). The non-physical form of interaction thus takes away the focus on the physical non-existence of the person and shifts the emphasis on the person’s life, as is visually represented by the constructed Facebook Profile. As Kern et al.’s study (2013), R.I.P.: Remain in Perpetuity, add, the poster might believe that because a link to the deceased’s formerly active life still remains in the virtual world, perhaps some part of them still dwells within that world, and can receive one’s messages to them post-mortem. “In the poster’s mind, Facebook is a place to commune with the dead in a space where the communication may actually be ‘received.’ The dead live in the virtual cloud, and can hear or read the messages from the living” (9). This does not seem so outlandish when one compares such communication to writing letters that one does not send which are in a sense addressed to the deceased; at least these types of online messages actually go somewhere, i.e., to a place where the deceased once was, making it feel more direct. !27 Kasket’s study (2012) noticed a trend that “people update the deceased person on everyday things long after the death” (66) in private Messages, for example. A participant in this same study reports something similar: “‘I check it...almost every day, give or take’” (66). One year after her friend’s passing, this participant visits the Profile of her deceased friend “almost every day”. This shows that in the majority of cases, “there is an investment in the maintenance of the bond” (66), as suggested by both Walter (1996) and Klass, Silverman and Nickman (2006), suggest, using the online presence of the deceased as the means for facilitating communication and healing. Having such long-term engagements with the deceased functions to help smooth out the transition of not having them in the one’s physical life anymore. It thus challenges the traditional notion of grief, pointing instead towards mourning as more of a perpetual process, geared toward integration rather than replacement. ! Contemporary Practices of Mourning: Some Difficulties Due to its public aspect and the typical casual content on one’s Facebook, it can be rather disturbing for users to find out about a death when logged on to it. One participant in Brubaker et al.’s study (2013), for example, says that she perceives Facebook as too casual of a medium for death-related news and posts: “‘[Grieving on Facebook is] a cheap way of celebrating someone’s life’” (156). It may appear that such individuals are ultimately being resistant to the potential extra comfort the online community of grievers can provide for them. Yet that is a matter of personal opinion and preference. What is of importance is that every individual does what he or she needs to do in order to express their grief when in mourning, in whatever way suits them. Grief is unique to every individual, for it represents one’s love for the deceased and the mourning !28 of the relationship that has been lost. It is only a “cheap” way if one perceives it so, which links back to the ideas suggested by McLuhan (1964), and Innis (1973) about the transformative affect of media. Perhaps this participant is appraising the use of the media in question, the internet (Facebook), with the method of appraisal suited for the previous age, and that is creating difficulties currently due to its inadequacy. Users such as these have not yet had their perceptions totally changed to adapt to the digital climate and the subsequent changes it evoked in behaviours and norms. Grieving online is part of how citizens of the digital world make sense of the death of others, being used to a culture of digitally preserved things which have extended permanence, longer lives, and unrivalled durability. Thus, as McLuhan and Innis would say, it is a symptom of the age of the internet to use digital technologies to filter through life’s processes and thereby organize and make sense of certain events, especially ones which are disruptive and hard to deal with, as is the case with loved ones dying. ! Concluding Thoughts ! In the digital age, as McLuhan astutely predicted, our media has come to re-articulate social norms on a large scale, to the extent that even ritualistic norms surrounding death have started to change. In other words, it appears as though “the internet may be radically redefining memorials toward ‘an ongoing process,’ one ‘that depends less on the implied eternity of a built physical environment than on the entirely different eternity of circulating information’” (Brubaker et al., 161). This shift in grief practices is occurring so as to better suit the internet-based digital culture in the twenty-first century, or the “age of instantaneous information” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, 155). Whether or not one chooses to !29 grieve on Facebook during their own periods of mourning, there is no denying that this trend among youths exists and will likely continue. That is why “an awareness of this fast-evolving phenomenon, and a framework for understanding it, are both critical to providing effective bereavement support in the digital age” (Kasket, 69). Though the trend is currently most popular among younger generations, it is only growing; youth will soon be adults dealing with children of their own who are also brought up in the digital age, so having bereavement care specialists accommodate to this new climate and method of grieving is paramount for the future efficacy of grief counselling. With regard to the implications of the knowledge discussed in this paper, the most compelling question to ask oneself, and others, comes from the study done by Kasket (2012). She asks: “What will an increasing awareness of our Facebook profiles as being part of our digital legacy, our durable biography, mean for the way we co-construct these profiles?” (69). Future research in this field is needed, especially pertaining to element of individual Profile construction and how one does this, noting whether or not they are mindful of the fact that it could quite possibly outlive them and effectively become one’s legacy. In the end though, the evidence discussed in this paper is evidence of only one of the drastic cultural changes enacted by the advent of the internet which is presently identifiable, that is, how it has come to be immensely helpful for those who are in mourning for a numb of reasons. Thus, changes in other traditional social and cultural norms are very likely to occur in the not-so-distant future. !30 Works Cited Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society: An International Journal 29.3 (2013): 152-163. Taylor and Francis Journals. Routledge, 3 May 2013. Web. 29 Dec. 2013. Butler, Judith. "Violence, Politics, Mourning." Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2003. 19-49. Print. Carroll, Brian, and Katie Landry. "Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn." The Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 30.5 (2010): 341-349. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. Forman, Abbe E., Rebecca Kern, and Gisela Gil-Egui. "Death and Mourning as Sources of Community Participation in Online Social Networks: R.I.P. Pages in Facebook." First Monday 17.9 (2012): n. pag. 7 July 2012. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. Freud, Sigmund. 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