Deathin the Digital Age

CEBU, Philippines — The social networks are getting better at dealing with death, with people and companies building new digital rituals for grieving online.

The dead will overrun Facebook. Memorials won’t be cut from stone anymore, but carved out in pixels.

Online grief

The web can open up safe spaces for people to grieve. Online communities can give support to what University professor Panagiotis Pentaris calls “disenfranchised grief.” “Digital communities offer an audience that you can’t find elsewhere,” Pentaris said. “They offer the opportunity to become an acknowledged griever... to express those emotions that you can’t express elsewhere.”

Digital memorials

Memorials no longer need to be physical objects. Stacey Pitsillides, a lecturer in design, described one family who lost their son to cancer. His games developer father, Ryan Green, created a game called “That Dragon, Cancer” to remember his son Joel. “They made the experience into an environment that people could navigate, to try to understand that kind of loss,” Pitsillides said. “It’s a mix between a game, a memorial and a narrative.”
Memorials pop up in other ways, too. Author Terry Pratchett’s death spurred an e-petition begging Death – a frequent character in his books – to bring him back to life. Despite the 35,000 signatures, it didn’t work, but it did give fans a way to show their grief in a collective way. “It was so appropriate for who Terry Pratchett was,” Pitsillides said. “He’d have loved it.”

Letting go

Social networks have made other missteps, such as suggesting dead friends for the living to follow or highlighting loved ones who have just passed in “year in review” videos. But some people don’t mind the reminder, and even use social networks to keep “talking” to dead friends, sending them messages as though the person who has passed on will appreciate it.

“When I pray, I don’t know if she hears me,” Pitsillidesquoted her interview subjects. “But when I write to her on Facebook, she hears me. I know it’s not logical, but that’s how it feels.”

Death and technology

People use social media to express themselves, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to tech companies that they’d do the same after the death of a loved one – one of the most emotional experiences many people will have. Facebook et al are happy with users posting positive moments – such as births and weddings – but social media “wasn’t designed with death in mind,” said Pitsillides. “It’s really strange that technology is very naïve when it comes to death.”

She predicts that will change, with sites getting better at dealing with death, and new social networks now building it into their design. There’s no shortage of ideas to keep people’s digital memory alive. (www.pcauthority.com.au)