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.