Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age

In this chapter, I argue that a deceased person’s Facebook profile is transformed from a tool for communication and autobiography to one for mourning and memorializing, and back again. Such a profile can be used as a space to express and share grief, and as a memorial object that preserves memories of the deceased. However,

From this possibility of enhancing the happiness of the deceased comes the implication that the message sender and intended recipient will be reunited eventually.

Scott Simon, the NPR reporter who live-tweeted his mother’s death during her last days and hours.

what do we do with a Facebook profile after the person who created it has died?

In this way, Facebook becomes a technospiritual system capable of mediating communication about and to the deceased.47

“[w]hat is happening on the profile pages of the deceased is nothing revolutionary but rather a new and in some ways logical platform for people to memorialize and grieve.”25

The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.

Brubaker and Hayes note that direct messages usually are directed to the deceased, not, as one might expect, to co-mourners.19

A memorial object is built and maintained by an audience composed of mourners rather than by an institution.