Title
Orienting to Networked Grief: Situated Perspectives of Communal Mourning on Facebook
Abstract
Contemporary American experiences of death and mourning increasingly extend onto social network sites, where friends gather to memorialize the deceased. That "everyone grieves in their own way'' may be true, but it forecloses important questions about how people evaluate these expressions, their relationship to others who are grieving, and impacts on their own experiences of grief. Drawing from mixed-methods research conducted over five years, we describe how individuals position themselves within and evaluate expressions of networked grief. We start by identifying five orientations -- reinforcing, supporting, transferring, objecting, and isolating -- that describe how individuals evaluate actions of grievers, position themselves relative to the network, and act when they encounter grief. We then describe factors and tensions that influence how individuals arrive at these orientations. Based on our findings, we argue that the design of social media can be sensitized to diverse needs by adopting a situated perspective within a dynamic post-mortem network.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3359129
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Keywords
Field
DocType
death, facebook, grief, memorialization, social media, social network sites
Situated,Grief,Sociology,Psychoanalysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
3
CSCW
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jed R. Brubaker132331.02
Gillian Hayes21852155.64
Melissa Mazmanian323618.71