[Air-L] Facebook Grieving and bereavement

[Charles M. Ess]

One of our MA students interviewed both younger and a couple of older 
people regarding their experiences with death and bereavement on FB.  I 
summarized some of the points in a forthcoming chapter:
==
Important examples of such courage and resistance are documented by 
Astrid Hovde (2016) in her interviews with the bereaved who first 
learned of the death of a sibling, close friend, or child through a 
hasty posting to their Facebook page from someone seeking to express 
condolences.  Certainly, a number of important positives flowed in many 
instances from diverse uses of social media in these experiences. But 
for six of ten interviewees, multiple aspects of such online grieving 
and memorializing were increasingly experienced as fake, as more 
self-interested expressions from persons who paid no attention to them 
in their offline encounters (Hovde 2016, 101). Not surprisingly, several 
found that grieving required the embodied co-presence of others – family 
and close friends – who could hold and comfort them in their deepest 
moments of sorrow and anguish.  The sharp contrast between these online 
and offline experiences inspired two interviewees (“Sophie” and 
“Elisabeth”) to dramatically reduce their use of Facebook (Hovde 2016, 
51-59) – a form of courageous resistance and disobedience to prevailing 
norms, especially for young people in Norway who are among the most 
active users of social media.  These turns away from social media were, 
however, necessary in order to confront the deeply existential 
experiences of loss, and to then take these up, in Jaspers’ and Arendt’s 
terms, as limit-situations that open up new possibilities for us 
(natality) – specifically as they found therein ways of moving into new 
stages of independence and relationship.
==

The thesis is publicly available:
Hovde, Astrid Linnea Løland. 2016. Grief 2.0: Grieving in an Online 
World. MA thesis, Department of Media and Communication, University of 
Oslo. 
<https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/52544/Hovde-Master-2016.pdf?sequence=5>

Additional resources can be found via the Death Online Research Symposia 
(DORS) and the work of its participants - certainly including Larissa 
Hjorth and Katie Cumiskey, as Larissa noted.
The group has a FB page (of course):
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeathOnlineResearch/?multi_permalinks=1076644705844646%2C1075485012627282%2C1075441515964965&notif_id=1535339058151279&notif_t=group_activity>

I would search for the work of Stine Gotved;
Elaine Kasket (_All the Ghosts in the Machine: Illusions of Immortality 
in the Digital Age_, now on Amazon);
dorthe refslund christensen;
Ylva Hård af Segerstad and her work on bereaved parents' use of FB,
e.g.,

Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Communities: De-Tabooing Practices or 
Relation-Building Grief-Ghettos?
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Dick Kasperowski & 
Kjetil Sandvik
Pages 58-72 | Published online: 07 Mar 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2016.1273929

A community for grieving: Affordances of social media for support of 
bereaved parents
Y Hård Af Segerstad, D Kasperowski
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21 (1-2), 25-41

I can only echo and reiterate the importance of the work of Amanda 
Lagerkvist and her colleagues, as Amanda has helpfully noted.

Hope this is of some help - great query, obviously!

best,
- charles ess

On 24/10/2018 20:30, Regina Tuma wrote:
> Dear List Members,
> I have a student who is interested in studying bereavement posts on Facebook. I’m wondering if you know of any interesting readings.
> Much appreciated,
> Regina
> 
> Regina M Tuma, PhD
> Doctoral Faculty, Media Psychology
> School of Psychology
> Fielding Graduate University
> 2020 De la Vina Street | Santa Barbara, CA 93105
> http://www.fielding.edu/
> Twitter @obspsy
> 
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-- 
Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

Postboks 1093
Blindern 0317
Oslo, Norway
c.m.ess at media.uio.no