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Through a qualitative study of YouTube bereavement vlogs and posts by young people about parental death, this article examines the rise and significance of intimate mourning between strangers. An unexpected finding of this research has been the speed with which young people create vlogs or post messages of their bereavement; very often within hours of a death. The question of time in relation to bereavement grief is thus a feature of this article’s analysis. The article argues that YouTube, like other social media, exposes and contests the disenfranchising of grief in offline social settings and relationships while, at the same time, enfranchising disaffected and excluded bereavement discourse via media sociality. It also argues, conversely, that YouTube, like other social media, is now a primary social space (not secondary or supplementary); it provides the where and how and who to connect with regarding personal grief and bereavement.

This article discusses private, informal memorialisation practices that mark scenes and sites of death in public spaces and places. It focuses on changing practices of public visibilities of death and grief – practices that render visible in a semiotic way what would otherwise be invisible or relatively unknown occurrences of death. It argues that roadside memorials and other types of informal public memorials bring to consciousness and signification spaces and places that might otherwise be perceived as death neutral or untouched by death.

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