Digital mourning on Facebook: the case of Filipino migrant worker live-in caregivers in Israel

Abstract

The practice of mourning on social media, known as digital mourning, has become a worldwide phenomenon. While scholarly attention focuses on manifestations of online grief, there is a dearth of research regarding this process among immigrants. Based on a digital ethnography on Facebook on the Filipino community in Israel, this study inquires how migrant workers construct their mourning on digital networks. Focusing on grief upon death in the host country, two different practices of digital mourning were found. When Filipino live-in caregivers announce the loss of their elderly employers, their personal pain is shared on their own Facebook wall, receiving personal condolence comments. However, when a fellow Filipino migrant worker passes away, the pain is shared in closed community groups on Facebook, which are followed by thousands of condolence comments. This practice creates a communal feeling that can be termed Communal Digital Grief, and differs from the Personal Digital Grief experienced by migrants as a result of the loss of their employer. This study sheds light on two different practices of digital mourning. One appears on the personal Facebook walls of the bereaved and has therapeutic impact, while the other appears on closed Facebook groups and contributes to community building.

How social media data are being used to research the experience of mourning: A scoping review

“…The most prevalent academic disciplines of first authors included Communication (n = 27; 30%) [45,46,59,61,62,87,88,91,[95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113]. Psychology (n = 14; 16%) [20, 67, 74, 75, 79-81, 89, 114-119], Nursing (n = 7; 8%) [120][121][122][123][124][125], Sociology (n = 7; 8%) [43,44,66,77,78,126,127], and others (n = 34; 38%). The most widely used type of SM was social networking sites (n = 35; 39%), with Facebook the main platform used (n = 29; 32%) (Fig 2).…”

“…In these records, there was a large variation in sample size (range = 8-291443 units). Two records used images [127] or audiovisual posts [78], one record analyzed emojis from posts [84], and 9 records analyzed multiple data types [20,46,63,68,83,85,88,109,126].…”

“…While most records did not specify the overarching methodology underpinning their research (n = 67; 75%), of the records that did mention a methodology, two main methodologies were used by researchers to explore mourning on SM: ethnography (n = 13; 15%) [61,72,73,83,88,90,109,111,126], including digital ethnography-also referred to as netnography, or virtual, or PLOS ONE online ethnography, and grounded theory (n = 7; 8%) [44,64,66,87,106,108,117]. Critical realism [71] and interpretive phenomenology analysis [89] were also mentioned in one record each.…”

The implications of migration policies on migrant worker mixed families: The case of Filipinos in Israel

“…This study is part of a larger university research project covering various issues regarding the Filipino community in Israel (Babis, 2020, 2021; Babis et al., 2021; Sabar et al., 2021) which combines qualitative and quantitative research methods. The mixed methods design enabled capturing a holistic view of the phenomenon of the mixed families formed by Filipinos in Israel.…”

“…3 This migration was part of the labor export policy promulgated in the Philippines in the 1970s as a strategy to cope with severe economic crisis. 4 As mentioned earlier, Filipino migration has increased since the 1990s due to Israel’s policy to import temporary migrant workers to work as live-in caregivers for the elderly and the disabled (Liebelt, 2011; Shamir, 2013; Golan and Babis, 2019a, 2019b; Babis, 2020). Following a formal agreement between Israel and the Philippines, thousands of Filipino caregivers (86 percent of whom are women) (CBS, 2019) were recruited and became important providers of live-in home care for the elderly in Israel.…”