“There Isn't Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages

Abstract

Today, social network sites are a key site for public displays of connection and grieving. Mourners weigh the benefits of publicness with the problems associated with large and diverse audiences. The replicability, scalability, persistence, and searchability features of networked publics influence both how mourners grieve and their control over depictions of the deceased. This article analyzes a corpus of posts and comments on Facebook memorial pages (N = 37). We examine how the social and technical affordances of social media, and Facebook in particular, affect public displays of grief and portrayals of the deceased. The visibility of social media both encourages performative displays of mourning and allows wider audiences to pay respects. This openness allows for context collapse and potentially unwelcome participants such as “trolls.” We consider the ways in which the publicness of the SNS memorial page affects displays of grieving, specifically around efforts to engage in impression management of the deceased.