The phenomenon of "digital" death: formation and genesis of the attitude to death in social networks of students

Abstract

In this paper, we study the phenomenon of “digital” death, its genesis and the attitudes towards death in the context of social networks of students. As a result of the investigation we have discovered different forms of “digital death and the ways students react to it in social networks. We further investigate the origins of different user attitudes towards “digital death” and the impact of manipulative relation to death in social networks on the social reality. Some students stage their own death on social networks by posting images on their homepage, which has the intentions (i) to attract public attention, (ii) to express their auto aggression (iii) to make fun of death and (iv) to reduce their own anxiety of death by "sharing" the fear with other students. Our analysis shows that the main purpose of staging one’s death on social networks is to reduce the fear of death by creating plans, playing.
 Keywords: Students, cyberspace, social networks, death, "digital" death, attitude to the death in the social networks.

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…Research on this theme thus explores platforms like blogs (Sofka, 2012) and social media as (relatively) new spaces to grieve and mourn (Bassett, 2015; Brubaker & Hayes, 2011; Egnoto et al, 2014; Moore et al, 2019; Moreman & Lewis, 2014), often comparing and connecting practices and affordances of online memorialization to conventional rituals of grief and mourning (Bovero et al, 2020; Brubaker et al, 2013; De Vries & Moldaw, 2012; Kohn et al, 2018; Meese, Gibbs, et al, 2015; Mori et al, 2011; Nansen et al, 2014). The bereaved and the organizations that support them are turning to the Internet, similarly to how they once turned to print media (Jones, 2004), to explore a multitude of new ways to feel connected to both the living and the dead (Arnold et al, 2017), to share and manage grief (Hutchings, 2016b), to make sense of and add levity to death (Nikishina et al, 2020), to visualize and celebrate the lives of the deceased (Leaver & Highfield, 2015, 2018), and to access social support in online bereavement groups (Massimi, 2013). As a result, death practices have shifted from relatively private affairs to being experienced more publicly, often with a public record of the grief (Graikousi & Sideri, 2020) and with new possibilities for unwanted participation (e.g.…”