From private to public: the experience of mourning in digital society between digital obituary and digital gravestone
From private to public: the experience of mourning in digital society between digital obituary and digital gravestone

Summary/Abstract: The digitization of society has redefined many dimensions of social reality, in-cluding such an individual experience as death. Even today, the end of life and the experienceof mourning represent social issues that, on both the analog and digital planes, provoke broaddebates and contrast spaces for reflection and the crossing of ethical and epistemological thresh-olds. While, however, in the physical world, there is the persistence of an invisibilization ofdeath, in the digital world, death would seem to regain wide spaces of argumentation, narrative,and explicitness, shared and regulated by internalized social and moral norms. The article aimsto analyze the social, emotional, and imaginary aspects of the end of life and the experience ofmourning mediated by digital tools. In the context of digital ethnography, these aspects wereexplored through content analysis of living people’s interactions with the deceased’s profile onthree social media (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp1). The aim was to identify a typologyof users and the different narrative and elaborative modes of mourning by introducing the terms“Digital Gravestone” and “Digital Obituary”, not lacking, in the concluding part, references toethical aspects on possible end-of-life scenarios and the experience of mourning.

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