The postself in blogs about terminal illness

Authors

  • Melissa Schilderink Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University
  • Eric Venbrux Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University

Keywords:

Postself, online, terminal illness, death, blogs,, narrative

Abstract

When confronted with the approaching end of their lives, people can turn to narrating and sharing personal stories in an online blog as a way of creating a legacy. In doing so, as well as creating a legacy, they may construct an online postself that will survive their physical death. Through the ritual practices to ‘keep the dead alive’, performed within the online ritual spaces that these blogs become, an online transcendent reality can arise in which the postself can continue to exist. Additionally, a reconstruction of this identity can take place as the bereaved take over the deceased’s blog. Based on our qualitative analysis of five personal blogs on terminal illness, and drawing on Shneidman’s concept of the postself, we describe the ways in which both the dying and the bereaved contribute to, and maintain, the narrative construction of postself in the demarcated framework of weblogs.

Author Biographies

Melissa Schilderink, Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University

Melissa Schilderink is an advanced MA student of Religious Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she is completing an internship at the Centre for Thanatology. She researched weblogs of the terminally ill. Currently, her research interest is in imaginaries of nature in Dutch funerary culture.

Eric Venbrux, Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University

Eric Venbrux is Professor of Comparative Religion and director of the Centre for Thanatology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Switzerland, Australia and the Netherlands. His research interests are in local religion, ritual change, material culture and the verbal and visual arts. He has published extensively on mortuary ritual.

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Published

2023-09-27

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Section

Articles