#Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a study of Instagram use and funerary practices that analysed photographs shared on public profiles tagged with '#funeral'. We found that the majority of images uploaded with the hashtag #funeral often communicated a person's emotional circumstances and affective context, and allowed them to reposition their funeral experience amongst wider networks of acquaintances, friends, and family. We argue that photo-sharing through Instagram echoes broader shifts in commemorative and memorialization practices, moving away from formal and institutionalized rituals to informal and personalized, vernacular practices. Finally, we consider how Instagram's 'platform vernacular' unfolds in relation to traditions and contexts of death, mourning, and memorialization. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how platform vernaculars are shaped through the logics of architecture and use. This research also directly contributes to the understanding of death and digital media by examining how social media is being mobilized in relation to death, the differences that different media platforms make, and the ways social media are increasingly entwined with the places, events, and rituals of mourning.

Snapchat memory and youth digital sexual cultures: mediated temporality, duration and affect

“…It is at once difficult to maintain secrets within Snapchat, and difficult to prove authenticity. (Grosz 2004: 118) Snapchat is set apart from other digital 'platform vernaculars' (Gibbs et al, 2014) by is its strange temporality and ostensibly disappearing content. Explored through a Bergsonian and Deleuzian framework, we argued that what we might call 'Snapchat memory' is a murky, unreliable and changing thing and the memory image created by Snapchat has variable affects and effects for youth sexual cultures.…”

Visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images

“…Individual platforms do not just have their own politics (Gillespie, 2010), but also particular ways of shaping the creative possibilities of user expression within platform vernaculars (Burgess, 2006). Multimodal affordances and, especially, 'social media's increasingly visual turn' are at the foundation of this theory (Gibbs et al, 2015). Gibbs et al's(2015) research into platform vernaculars is grounded on a multimodal, image-textual dataset that features visual posts in addition to hashtags and comments.…”

“…In an article discussing funerary practices on Instagram, Gibbs et al (2015) coin this term as 'a way of understanding how communication practices emerge within particular SNS [social network sites] to congeal as genres.' The norms, protocols, and user cultures of different social media platforms codify their own conversational forms and rhetorics tailored to their respective online contexts.…”

“…We argue that VCPA can enhance our understanding of 'platform vernaculars' (Gibbs, Meese, Arnold, Nansen, & Carter, 2015): the different narrative patterns that shape content and information flows across platforms. We do this by identifying visual vernaculars, drawing on two collaborative, international research projects examining large social media datasets related to climate change across five platforms: Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and Facebook.…”

Hashtag Recovery: #Eating Disorder Recovery on Instagram

“…Users share images, either still or moving, with captions and/or "hashtags" with other Instagram users. Hashtags are short categorizing terms that place photos in conversation with other users' posts (Gibbs et al 2015). Users can connect with others who share interests; they can also interact on the platform in the form of "liking" or commenting on photos.…”