New Media Use in Mitigating Existential Fear

Författare

• Kaylee P. Kruzan University of Illinois, Chicago

Abstract

Much of the existing literature concerning death and internet technologies has focused on how Social Networking Sites (SNS hereafter) construe and cope with the “digital dead.” Both academic and popular sources have noted and discussed recent modifications on Facebook, for instance, that allow family members to memorialize deceased relatives’ profiles (Landfair 2013, 9). While at first SNS tended exclusively to immortal tenants, in that, profiles were not designed to deactivate once an individual deceased, today the human condition (life and death) is recognized and reflected in the design of these platforms.

While developments like those mentioned on Facebook further prove the relevance and timeliness of this fertile ground for death in online research, the current article intends to diverge slightly from the primary vein by attending to the ways in which the living use SNS, like Facebook, in order to cope with, and subconsciously escape, anxieties related to their own pending mortality.

By drawing from research in Terror Management Theory (TMT hereafter) and applying this to a framework adopted from literature across disciplines, this essay will outline the ways in which SNS can be seen as platforms on which the human condition is made further ambiguous and the mitigation of mortality related anxieties can ensue. By granting humans extension and disengagement with physical limitations, upon a platform that allows one to leave a clear “digital trace,” SNS foster an environment upon which one can attain a sense of meaning, perceived permanence, and move from a mere animal-like to more god-like existence. The mitigation of existential anxieties and the achievement of symbolic immortality through SNS are of primary importance in this essay.