Digital Mourning
On Web 2.0 Death and Mourning
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by Korina GiaxoglouTo speak of death is, for Roland Barthes(i), to speak of the ‘nothing to say’. What to say when I lose those whom I love deeply? What to say when every day I am faced with the certainty of my own death? Nothing. Ordinary language collapses and death is draped in silence.
In modern life, literal death is enacted by a click of the photographer that turns the subject targeted by the lens into an object. This is perhaps why the photograph of my late grandmother, which I had taken some years before her death, disturbs me. I look at the double death that it inscribes; the first one enacted by my click back then, the second one enacted in her last breath. I linger over her pose of a smile that reminds me that she once was, and that she now is not. The pain I engender emanates from having lost her as well as having lost our relationship. I console myself in holding on to her photograph, a testimony to her past existence, at the same time as a stark reminder of her radical absence. In the role of a distant spectator, I struggle to find the traces of my grandmother’s being and our bond in the depths and details of her total, still image. Death and mourning in the age of social media I now ask myself what if…my grandmother had lived her life in the digital era of social media and web communications? Would the new technologies of communication have afforded me a different way of mourning and remembering her? Let us assume for a moment that my grandmother had counted herself among the 829 million active users of Facebook around the world(ii). This would mean that she’d probably have created and maintained an active Facebook profile during her lifetime, posting updates on her every day life, sharing photos, music and news items, commenting on my updates or just nodding at me with a Like. After her death, her profile would be memorialised: no new friends would be added and shared content would not be edited or deleted. Content would remain visible to her networked friends and depending on the privacy settings of the account, friends could continue to send public messages on the Timeline or even send her private messages(iii). After the death of my grandmother, and Facebook friend, I would find myself surrounded by all the significant moments of life she would have shared with and for a networked audience. The public visibility and accessibility of the profile would invite a continuous flooding of posts in direct interaction with her and the networked bereaved. And so, I would be mourning over her digital body, entextualised via photos, updates and hyperlinks now epitomising moments of her past life. I would probably feel consoled when revisiting the tributes pouring from family members, friends, acquaintances and even strangers or in browsing all the moments she had produced and shared on the temporally ordered events layered on her digital wall. Now a memorial panel, her memorialised profile would form a virtual hangout for grieving, mourning and remembering her in all her different roles as grandmother, mother, aunt, teacher and friend. Most importantly, her profile populated with digital content of self-selected life snapshots in multimodal configurations would form the authenticating record of her lived experience. And I, as an onlooker, would be delving into the moments she had felt to be significant, reinterpreting every single wall event against the knowledge that she is going to die. Mourning for her online would make me realise that every click on Post, Share or Like enacts flash death by rendering a shared moment of life into a digital object for circulation while post-mortem, shared digital content turns into one’s lifetime legacy, a testimony to a lived life and a call for digital mourning to be staged. Interactivity in virtual mourning The above scenario raises a broader question regarding whether the advent of social media has brought about any significant changes in how death and mourning is enacted and staged(iv). To begin with, in terms of the interactivity involved in social media network sites for mourning, no substantial difference to the interactivity involved in other contexts of mourning activity can be noted. The non-reciprocal dialogue one enters in when, for instance, browsing a photo album, laying flowers by the grave, or leaving written messages and memorial items on shrines or roadside memorials is quite similar to the interactivity involved in browsing a memorialized profile or posting written messages online. Mourning, both offline and online(v), involves some level of interaction with the dead in a variety of sociocultural guises be it spiritual, religious, or psychotherapeutic. Social network site platforms, such as Facebook, however lend an increased sense of interactive dynamism in mourning activity. This dynamism is more evident, for instance, in the way the dead is constructed as an absent present. Typical memorial posts(vi) in memorial walls tend to refer not just to past moments of life shared, but also to present or future moments where the deceased is included, often as a guardian watching from above, illustrated in the following memorial post: ‘Hey budd I ask for u to watch over our team as we head to state this afternoon and be with us tonight. Miss u man!!(vii)’ In addition, interaction with the networked bereaved can be seen as enhancing the process of coping with loss. For instance, the 24/7 access to one’s profile from any internet-based location around the world or even on the go via a mobile device affords easy communication with an extended network of sympathetic others who may not be as easily accessible in one’s immediate surroundings. The bereaved can draw on the support resources online, by browsing the memorial posts of others or by having their posts responded to by a supportive comment or a Like. Finally, flexibility in terms of access to online sites for mourning encourages the customization of mourning to the emotional needs, preferences and lifestyle of the individual mourner. The public staging of grief at one’s convenience means that the bereaved can feel included in the practice of mourning that extends beyond the fixed roles typical of formal ceremonies. Overall, online spaces for mourning can be seen as complementing formal ceremonies and memorials, providing the bereaved with an informal space for mourning(viii) that can be inclusive of different approaches to death and mourning. Having said that, it would be an oversimplification to assume that social media straightforwardly expands and enhances mourning, without any real impact to the experience of mourning. The experience of death and mourning Death and mourning form the par excellence transformative experience in one’s lifetime, even when imagined as a possibility, and are constitutive of our relationship to self, the other and time. Mourning calls up the question of our own survival, deeming the separation between a lived past and an uncertain future where all we are left with are traces of a past conjured up in the form of memories. These streaks of time are a way of remembering as much as of forgetting that make up and at the same time dissolve the coherence of the self. The experience of mourning, then, is the experience of the paradoxes of time as duration, memory and forgetting at its most acute point. On social network sites, which are characterised by an obsession with newness and the injunction to share(ix), the experience of death and mourning risks losing its connections with fading time. Web environments lack a sense of the patina of time, visible for example in an old photograph of a loved one long gone or the wilted flowers laid on a gravestone. Fading time acts as a stark reminder of where we are in time and affords us lucidity in reflecting on our relationship with the past and the future. Instead, memorialised profiles online seem to sustain a sense of disbelief over the passing of time and the nothingness of death. The injunction to share and stage grief on a semi-public or public wall seems ultimately to evade the need for reflection on the vagaries of time and self in favor of a positive outlook that sweeps death over with a quick tinting brush. Is mourning online underscored by the realisation that what death has brought on us is the entrusting of everything to the sole memory that is ‘in me’ or ‘in us’ as Derrida suggests(x)? Or is it constituted by the thrusting of intimate traces of the past to virtual spaces so as to evade the experience of mourning and grieving altogether? Web 2.0 environments can be great for the staging of shock by disenfranchised mourners, celebrity fans or anyone affected by a sudden death and they are undoubtedly useful when it comes to practical matters, such as keeping networked friends of the deceased from different walks of life updated with news about memorial services and events, promoting fundraising activities and providing increased opportunities for interactivity with each other or the deceased. In and through Web 2.0 mourning an individual’s existence is authenticated, expanded in the digital world and death is multiplied as a shock event. And yet the possibility of experiencing mourning in its depths of feeling as a transformative practice involving our affective reflection on time and intersubjectivity seems much harder to achieve. In mourning we bear witness to the other’s existence and radical absence. If mourning is the ultimate acknowledgment of the other, it is at the same time an affirmation of the relational self, furnishing meaning in and through being in, with, and for the other. Experiencing it totally, either online, offline, or across both modalities, is a way of affirming life through the acute sense of radical absence. So, with regards to whether social media are impacting on the way we mourn, we may want to reframe the question in the context of postmodern life and ask whether there are opportunities for us to engage with death and mourning as something deeper than a shock or as something more than the staging of normative social grief. In Place of an Epilogue Mourning has no end and nor should this article have a closing. In place of an epilogue, I would like to conclude with an example that perhaps points to the potential of social media in staging mourning on a global scale. In the case of circulating images of shock from the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict, social media walls and screens become inundated with pictures of mothers, fathers or siblings with their mouths gaped open in the shape of a scream whose echo outcries death. In that case, mourning has gone viral amidst biased mainstream news and broadcasting reports(xi); the still photos re-inscribe and multiply death and at the same time become the authenticating record of the lived experience of an entire people. The focus is not on authenticating individual pain and grief, but rather on placing the global media spectator in the position of a distant mourner. By witnessing the radical absent as linked to our own being, we are awakened to our social responsibility. This case exemplifies the potential of mourning for affirming radical absence, echoing a scream for survival, and inciting a global response of outrage, compassion and commitment the outcomes of which remain to be seen. The question of the impact of social media on how we approach death and mourning will have to remain open to scrutiny. We may be evading the transformative experience of mourning when we follow the injunction to stage and share our intimate grief in Web 2.0 participatory environments; and yet witnessing and empathising with the distant suffering(xii) and mourning of others on our social media networks might be leading us to reassess the importance of death for understanding the self, the other and fading time and convince us that we cannot afford to evade the experience of mourning. (i) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 2000 [1993]), 92-93.
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Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -