Death and Digi-memorials: Perimortem and Postmortem Memory Sharing through Transitional Social Networking

Authors

• Ishani Mukherjee University of Illinois, Chicago
• Maggie Griffith Williams University of Illinois, Chicago

Abstract

Impending death and the event of passing can leave one in a state beyond bereavement, leading to a penchant for rationalizing the entire process. Increasingly people turn to social media not only as a community of mourners who come together to share their grief, but also to create chronicles of hope for the deceased’s life-before-death through acts of sharing emotional narratives, prayers of faith, as well as relational visuals awaiting the passing away. These digital networking communities have displayed the power to hold onto the fleeting. Social media possess an inherent quality of conceptual permanence that make them transitional public conduits for talking about the possibility of miracles to halt imminent death, fluidly followed by discussions of the transience of life. This essay critically evaluates extant literature on peri- and postmortem research with a focus on how the transitional narrative of sustaining hope and shared grieving is said to have been created on social network sites. We argue that digital acts of sharing prayers and intimate memories during the transitional phase (the period connecting the before and after mortem phases of a loved one) as done within social networking sites such as Facebook, conflates and complicates our accepted notions of social presence by reinforcing the digital enactment of what people do in offline grieving spaces.