Death, grief, Facebook and the construction of memory
When someone dies, do you learn about it from a phone call in the night, an obituary in a local paper - or from logging onto Twitter or Facebook?
And just what happens when grief meets social media?
In “Virtual Mourning and Memory Construction on Facebook: Here Are the Terms of Use,” researchers at the University of Toronto explore the online information practices of people grieving, commemorating, and mourning a loved one.
The study, by U of T’s Faculty of Information (iSchool) Librarian Kathleen Scheaffer and Professor Rhonda McEwen, also of University of Toronto Mississauga, was published recently in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. In it, McEwen and Scheaffer examine the implications of Facebook’s terms of use policies for the bereaved – and for the dead.