Social Media as Archival Practice and Paradigm Shifter in United States Death Care

Abstract

AbstractAs social media becomes more present in the lives of people worldwide, it pervades their deaths as well. Before the Civil War, death and mourning rituals in the United States were largely considered the province of the deceased's loved ones. Following shifts in funerary customs, 21st century Americans are more removed from death care than ever before. Despite this, social media usage patterns have prompted increasingly public digital expressions of grief and mourning. The medium has transformed into a cathartic space for bereaved individuals, with memorialization functions of social media platforms also recasting platforms as sites of preservation. This paper examines account memorialization features of Facebook and Instagram, exploring social media memorialization as archival practice, with a particular focus on the concept of continued use as preservation. By delving into social media phenomena such as context collapse, the paper considers ways public perceptions of death may be shifting in the digital age. In merging the fields of information science and death studies, this paper intends to raise new questions about the potential impact of social media archival practices on the development of more public reckonings with death in mainstream U.S. culture.