10
YOUNG PEOPLE AND DIGITAL
GRIEF ETIQUETTE
Crystal Abidin
In the aftermath after my younger sister passed away in May 2016, I did two
things. As an older sister fi gure among her social circles, I was compelled by an
ethics of care to meet up with her close friends to talk through their grief and to
solidify our newly formed friendships via shared trauma. As a digital anthropolo-
gist who has been studying young people’s self-curation practices, I turned to the
critical lens of ethnography to make sense of how digital technology was impact-
ing young people’s experiences with grief.
While it is tempting to claim altruism and assert that I wanted to channel the
most grievous event of my life so far into productive aims to help young people,
the honest confession is that turning my grief into a scholarly research project
became a comforting coping mechanism. The critical distance, sincere engage-
ment, and intimate vocabulary of ethnography was second nature to me, and
employed as a cushion to approach my pain in my own time, a lens to understand
my messy entanglements with hoarding digital materialities that belonged to my
sister, and a distraction and excuse to return to work and busy myself away from
depression. But as I penned more and more heartfelt confessions of grief on my
public blog to get through the diffi cult lulls in the dead of the night, these words
began circulating highly and going viral among small or specifi c grief commu-
nities online. When the unsolicited letters of comfort and vignettes of personal
grief past and present started to accumulate in several of my inboxes, I decided to
embark on a formal research project among young people in Singapore, beyond
merely my social circles, to study constructions of digital grief etiquette.
I embodied what it was like to be both a young person managing grief in
digital spaces and an ethnographer invested in understanding everyday practices.
I also yearned to transit from previous scholars and their passive observations of
grief and grieving to an intimate anthropological inquiry. To do this, I conducted
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 161
personal interviews with young people who self-reported using digital media (i.e.
the internet, social media, devices and artifacts, non-analogue spaces) to manage
their grief. Participants were solicited through three avenues: the snowballing of
personal contacts, a general call for participants among undergraduates in a local
university, and an opt-in interview session for participants at a local independent
arts and research center with whom I was conducting community outreach work
on internet culture.
I wanted to know how young people experience grief, what words and images
and thoughts and feelings they associated with their loss. I wanted to understand
how young people journeyed on their recovery, how this differed from analogue
coping mechanisms pre-social media or from older generations who may cope in
less public ways. I wanted to learn how young people created transient spaces for
each other to share their grief, how they constructed solidarity and conveyed empa-
thy and maintained networks of care. Among some of these young people, I was
also gifted the privilege to witness sections of their digital estates in order to under-
stand how they crafted content, ranging from emotive Instagram captions of mean-
ing photographs to extensive digital catalogues of every tactile item the deceased has
ever touched. Here are their stories of grief in the age of networked technologies.
Methodology
Through in-depth, in-person interviews across fi ve months from a pilot study in
Singapore conducted between September 2016 and January 2017, this chapter
considers how young people under 30 years old who have grown up with the
internet manage grief in digital spaces and develop repertoires of grief etiquette.
While the pilot study included personal interviews with ten young adults in their
early to mid-20s and fi ve healthcare professionals who work in palliative care or
counseling services, this chapter features interview data from six young adults
in their mid-20s for whom their recent experiences with loss were their fi rst
encounter with personal grief through death (see also Frost, 2014). However, the
analysis presented in this chapter is informed by fi ndings in the larger pilot study,
including consultative conversations with palliative care and counseling profes-
sionals who wanted to learn how academic research had the potential to shape
the types of services they provided.
The interviews conducted were between 30 and 90 minutes long. Three of
the young adults were interviewed individually and the other three requested
to be interviewed in the setting of a focus group. All participants offered to be
acknowledged by their fi rst names. Syed is a 24-year-old Arab male who lost
his father at age 11, and through grieving on Facebook and Instagram learnt
about the ethnic-related surveillance and pressures of public grieving. Luqman is
a 24-year-old Malay male who lost his romantic partner at age 18, and through
maintaining his partner’s highly prolifi c blog for some time and witnessing eulo-
gies on the blog and Friendster grappled with the sudden publicness of his private
162 Crystal Abidin
grief. Hannah is a 24-year-old Chinese female who lost her best friend at age 24,
and through grieving on Facebook and Instagram struggled with the materiality
of digital data and physical artifacts that she felt were precarious and vulnerable to
loss. Cherry, Arlene, and Alyssa are 24-year-old Chinese females who requested
to be interviewed in the setting of a focus group, having collectively lost a close
friend at age 24. Through grieving on Facebook and Instagram, the trio ques-
tioned the credibility of information and authenticity of grief expressed on social
media when they witnessed competitive eulogizing among their larger social cir-
cle. Collectively, the stories of these young people constructed an infrastructure
of digital grief etiquette that encompassed cathartic self-care, protective group
policing, functional information sharing, and the construction of rhythms of grief
that were only feasible through deep engagements with digital technology.
This chapter begins with an overview of how experiences of death and grief
have been augmented in the digital age, followed by four sections on how
young people mediate personal grief through digital technology. “Grief across
networks” evidences the importance of audiencing grief on social media, how
physical and digital co-presencing crossover between platforms, and how some
young people use technology to attempt sincere or symbolic contact with the
dead. “Materialities of memory” reveals a recurring insecurity over the longev-
ity of digital artifacts and memorials, how young people convert materialities of
grief-related artifacts between the digital and the physical, and the construction
of digital memories. “Competitive eulogizing” demonstrates that digital eulogies
are functional, that crafting the perfect digital eulogy is an important process in
young people’s grief, and that grief hypejacking occurs among certain young
people who reframe grief for personal attention. “Digital rhythms of grief” analy-
ses how grief through social media is channeled toward self-care and recovery.
The chapter fi nally closes with some refl ections on digital grief etiquette and
mutual aftercare among and for the living.
Death in the Digital Age
Death has never been more public than in the age of the internet. Alongside
waves of #RIPCelebrity tributes, death-in-custody activism, and global grieving
tributes on highly viral hashtags (crystalabidin, 2016) proliferating on social media
are viral posts of everyday people approaching grief and documenting their expe-
rience on the internet: recounting a person’s fi nal days (Hawken, 2016), parting
words and gratitude from the deathbed (STOMP, 2016), captures of assisted sui-
cide and “right to die parties” (Hodge, 2016), and families commemorating the
deceased through visual photography (Mosbergen, 2013) and digital headstones
(monuments.com, 2017).
Experiences of death and loss have been augmented and prolonged in the
archive culture of the digital age (see also Walter et al., 2012). Platform affordances
and cultural norms on social media have kindled an archive culture generating a
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 163
wealth of digital footprints (Madden et al., 2007). In this climate, persons who
have passed away may be memorialized by loved ones, through the resurgence of
digital data and the subsequent re-curation of their post-death persona. Research
on death in the digital age has been formally instituted through dedicated journals
such as Death Studies (Taylor & Francis Online, 2017), and expertise research
institutes (Durham University, 2017; University of Bath, 2017).
Grieving practices have been examined in various disciplines as inter-
net memorial pages (Carroll & Landry, 2010; Kem et al., 2013) in which the
deceased and/or their funeral is commemorated on a public page, digital altars
(Gould et al., 2016) in which the living pay respects to the dead via technologi-
cal mediations, afterlife digital estate management (Hopkins, 2013) in which the
transfer and privacy of internet artifacts belonging to the deceased are negotiated,
and RIP trolling practices in which trolls hijack Facebook memorial pages with
abusive content (Phillips, 2013). This chapter presents one window through
which grief in the digital age can be understood through the lens of media
anthropology.
Grief across Networks
Audiencing Grief on Social Media
The young people in this study were highly cognizant of the continuums of pri-
vacy and publicness of their social media habits. They were especially conscien-
tious of the audiencing of their grief across networks depending on the types of
platforms used, the visibility of their posts on these platforms, the users who could
access their content, and the spillover of having their personal grief broadcast via
other people’s social media.
Syed decided early on to control and modify the tone of his digital eulogies
across Facebook and Instagram, contingent upon the audience of each space.
On his Facebook account where he has accumulated more “Friends” than on
Instagram, Syed has committed to maintaining a tone of positivity and thus
commemorates happier events. He regularly writes “commemorative posts”
through “simple status [updates]” on his late father’s birthday, and conducts a
personal count of how old his father would have been if he were still around.
Syed says that, on some level, his approach refl ects his father’s personality:
“He was a . . . great man in the simplest of ways [so I usually post] just a short
three liner.”
While Syed’s desire to convert his grief into a “more positive kind of experi-
ence” on Facebook is an act of self-care, later in the conversation he hints at a
surveillance pressure enacted upon him because his family members are “Friends”
of his on Facebook. Syed belongs to a community of Arabs in Singapore, who
have historically been a small diaspora in the country. As such, he feels that there
is greater pressure to “uphold their rituals,” especially pertaining to gendered
164 Crystal Abidin
displays of strength and vulnerability. He explains that the resilience of his two
older sisters, perceived by him to be articulated through the absence of grief
on their Facebook profi les, pressured him to obscure his grief even though he
maintains that he is “quite in touch with [his] emotions.” He felt it would have
been “uncomfortable” for Arab men to express loss instead of stoically anchor-
ing the household. However, as a compromise, he crafts his “commemorative
posts” on Facebook through a cryptic vocabulary that requires youth literacies of
code switching and emotive deciphering, much like the “social steganography”
described by media scholars danah boyd and Alice Marwick (2011). Syed explains
that backchannel fi ltering and encoding is a strategy: “I curate the posts to certain
extent, to make it seem as though . . . I’m a lot less sad than I really am. So there’s
this sort of unspoken understanding.”
Above and beyond audiencing, Syed also modifi es his digital eulogies depen-
dent on his designated use of specifi c social media. On Instagram, he has had
three consecutive accounts. Each account was deleted whenever Syed felt that
his audience was growing larger than what he was comfortable with, and his
second and third accounts were set to private and followed by only a handful of
people. This decision was a response to a self-refl exivity on the impression he was
imprinting upon other users:
grief goes on beyond that photo that you post. And sometimes a week later
you still . . . you will have a trigger . . . and you want to [post similar grief
content] but I don’t do it, because . . . I am aware and I’m conscious of the
kind of image of how Instagram is able to portray me as a person.
Syed appreciated the privacy that a closed account accorded him. He says he “was
a lot more vulnerable” when his “circle” was smaller. As such, he fully utilized
the visual nature of Instagram and used pictures to put together “bits and pieces of
[his] identity” (see also Finlay & Krueger, 2011), thus allowing him to talk about
his late father “from a rather different angle” than that of his more celebratory
Facebook birthday commemorations.
Although the ability to control the intended audience of one’s digital eulo-
gies was a crucial affordance in facilitating expressions of grief, this privilege
is removed when death is associated with a relatively public fi gure. Luqman
reveals that his romantic partner was a prolifi c blogger in Singapore in the
mid-2000s whose death was sudden and had occurred when she was travel-
ing abroad Thus, the young death became a subject of controversy and gossip
on the internet. On Friendster, where his profi le was connected to that of his
partner through shared content and mutual links, Luqman began to receive “a
lot of messages and friend requests” demanding the backstory the day after the
death. Back then, Friendster also featured a profi le view counter that registered
the number of views on one’s page, and Luqman recounts that his counter was
“really high.”
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 165
In a highly emotive recount, Luqman explains that the sudden sense of loss
that descended upon him was compounded and sullied by the unwanted atten-
tion thrust upon him:
It’s like very weird, like I felt like my privacy was . . . intruded . . . I was
already mourning over someone . . . I’m trying to go through life as nor-
mally as I should . . . regarding all these strangers trying to talk, I mean,
okay, I’m sure they mean no harm. They are just trying to know what
happened or something. But they don’t really have the business to know.
Yeah, and like I didn’t feel like I had space, like there’s no space for me.
In this incident, networked friendships through the platform of Friendster
images and hyperlinks allowed friends of the deceased and strange others to
not only trace but also solicit contact and information from Luqman. Had his
romantic relationship to the deceased not been visible through networked con-
tent, Luqman felt he would have had more space, time, and privacy to grieve
properly.
Physical and Digital Crossovers
In Luqman’s story above, he revealed that the speculations and tension around
being unwillingly audienced and possibly surveillanced severely impacted his
quality of life, when he perceived the harassment to bleed into physical space
(Gregg, 2011). As such, he did not want to leave the house for “a few weeks”
out of fear that “anyone can somehow recognize” him and approach him to start
a conversation at school. This crossover between digital eulogies and in-person
consolation often required rigorous negotiation and care. Syed explains that even
though his eldest sister is his “friend” on Facebook and has probably seen his
digital eulogies, they have “never ever talked about how sad” they were for years
until recently, thus reiterating that disclosive intimacies did not always naturally
translate from the digital to the physical.
However, should such mappings of intimacy occur across spaces, both Syed
and Luqman reckon that there are hierarchies of social ties for which such inter-
actions would be appropriate or taboo. On his now-defunct Instagram account,
Syed says his heartfelt posts became a “conversation starter” for his close friends
to learn even more about him, but insists that these had to be friends “suffi ciently
close” to him before such privy would be warranted. In a similar vein, Luqman
felt “very weird” and disoriented when “a bunch of people” whom he did not
know approached him in school to express their condolences. The digital incar-
nation of parasocial relations (Horton & Wohl, 1956) or “perceived intercon-
nectedness” (Abidin, 2015) that these students felt was not at all reciprocated by
Luqman, who felt that only friends who knew him “personally” had the authority
or right to approach him comfortably.
166 Crystal Abidin
Attempting Contact with the Dead
As young people grapple with their fi rst experience of death and grief, truncating
contact and especially digital communications with their loved one was a great
challenge. Hannah says she continued to “write directly” to her deceased friend
on private and semi-private digital platforms, personally addressing her as if she
was “speaking to her,” because the loss was so sudden and they had unfi nished
conversations. In a similar vein, Arlene, who says she had not been keeping up
with her deceased friend as much as she would have liked to, continued to send
text messages to a phone number that may or may not have been tended to.
Materialities of Memory
Fear of Loss of the Digital
For a group of digitally literate and savvy users, young people feared the loss
of digital footprints, artifacts, and meaningful connections with the deceased.
Luqman experienced this second wave of loss when he lost information in a
computer crash. He reveals that while he took care to convert his late partner’s
public blog into a private domain, retain the information in his hard drive, and
subsequently delete it, he had not anticipated that his computer would break
down and lose everything. In regret, he tells me: “So the only memories I have
are in my head, and it’s quite faint now.” Through this incident, he has come to
a new appreciation of people who use social media to post content as a proxy for
saving one version of their data in a cloud.
Hannah’s fear of digital loss derived from an ambiguity over the state of her
deceased friend’s social media accounts. In the immediate hours and days after news
of the death, Hannah had turned to Facebook’s “see friendship” function to recount
their friendship. But she suddenly realized the precarity and transience of social
media and felt a second impending sense of loss. Hannah reveals that she contacted a
family member of her deceased friend to ask if the account “was going to be closed,”
which would then constitute “a loss of [her] archive.” As a pre-emptive measure,
Hannah says she print-screened and saved all the content shared between her and
her deceased friend on Facebook, “just in case one day something happens.”
Conversion between Materialities
While Luqman and Hannah grappled with cloud-based and hard drive-based dig-
ital storage, Hannah and Syed consciously converted the physical into the digital
and vice versa as a backup strategy. In response to her fears of loss catalogued
above, Hannah explains that she has done “very irrational things” such as printing
a large number of photographs of her deceased friend. In retrospect, she realizes
that this spontaneous act occurred in a bid to placate her anxieties, because she
usually archives all her data digitally and diligently, “all the way up to 2013” when
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 167
she owned a smartphone. Yet, the fears of digital loss outweigh any practicalities,
and Hannah has come to see that even though material objects do “degenerate,”
“hard copies are more long lasting [while the] digital tends to get lost.”
On the other hand, Syed’s fears that “the physical photo itself will deterio-
rate in condition” encouraged him to take digital photos of his analogue photos,
which he stores in multiple places such as on his smartphone and computer. Like
Hannah, Syed experiences ambivalence about the materiality of his memories, but
says his move toward physical artifacts is not out of “more trust” in their reliability
but merely a “multi-tier approach” to prevent loss of the tangible and the abstract.
Constructing Digital Memories
Having grown up with and on digital media, several vignettes from young people
evidence technology-related obsessions, both conscious and subconscious. One
informant tells me that he grieved over the fact that WhatsApp messages he contin-
ues to send to his deceased friend’s phone will never be “double ticked” (to indicate
having been read), to the point that he has had dreams in which he would witness
his sent text messages to the deceased magically accumulate a “second tick.” Another
informant tells me that she dreamt of her deceased friend “liking” her social media
posts from beyond the grave as an indication of communication from the afterlife.
In the conscious world, young people moved through grief in their digital
networks in stages. Hannah says she shares multiple WhatsApp chat groups with
her deceased friend, where each group still refuses to remove the defunct number
from the chat. “No one wants to [be the person who] removes the number,” she
says, instead relinquishing this autonomy to the app or telephone network that
they envision will truncate contact on their behalf eventually.
The continued presence of a deceased person’s contact number or handle in
the group chat was also functional. Hannah tells me that whenever she and her
friends tap into the groupchat, seeing her deceased friend’s “membership” would
solicit imaginings of responses to them in the chat. They would continue their
conversations as usual, but slip in subtle quips that predicted their deceased friend’s
response, or send group photos to the chatgroup after an outing as if they were
still keeping their absent friend abreast of their routines. As such, digital memories
of the dead were not just archived and selectively invoked, but continually con-
structed anew and in the present albeit through the lens of speculative nostalgia.
Competitive Eulogizing
Digital Eulogies as Functional
Beyond the cloud of hyper-emotionality or self-care, some young people per-
ceived digital eulogies as functional amplifi ers of information. Since digital eulo-
gies were posted on social media where they often shared mutual friends with the
168 Crystal Abidin
deceased, it was a convenient way to relay the bad news en masse while carving out
personal space to grieve. Hannah says this is a good “news dissemination” method
because she “wouldn’t want to update people individually” and be inundated
with multiple queries. Posting on social media afforded her the option to selec-
tively respond to follow-up comments or condolences, and the publicness of her
post among a network of friends and intentional ignoring of follow-up comments
thereafter absolved her from the pressure of responding to dyad correspondence.
However, despite some convenience, the medium of social media also solic-
ited questions around credibility of information. Arlene recounts that when she
fi rst read Facebook posts about her now-deceased friend being very ill, the tone
and content was so cryptic that she could not discern the veracity of the informa-
tion. As such, she corroborated what she saw with other friends through private
text messages, and contextual backstories allowed her to now interpret the sub-
texts of the posts.
Cherry reiterated that such backchannel corroboration was crucial. She says
that the sibling of her deceased friend personally informed her of the news, and
that since it was known in social circles that Cherry is especially close to the
deceased, other friends who were witnessing “vaguebooking” or intentionally
ambiguous Facebook posts contacted her to verify the news. Because of the
speculative aspect of digital eulogies, Cherry decided that her close friends had
to hear about the news directly from her, and chose to send them texts via
WhatsApp. She explains that it “felt better than watching other random people
post on social media” and fi nding out second, third, or fourth hand.
On balance, young people felt that digital eulogies were personally rewarding
and useful. Alyssa emphasized that while it is tempting to dismiss social media hab-
its and content as vanity or frivolity, the act of self-presentation in digital spaces is
“inextricably” linked to “validation.” Between tears and giggles, she recalls an old
joke that “if a picture doesn’t make it on[to] social media [then an event] didn’t
really happen,” but swiftly contains herself to assert that social media has become
so integral for self-expression that young people will feel compelled to post on
their feeds about “something so big” as a fi rst encounter with death in their lives.
Cherry interjects to express that posting about milestone events both celebratory
and grievous is “very normal thing to do” for people in their age cohort.
Crafting the Perfect Digital Eulogy
As the focus group informants were debating over the functionality and cynicism
of grief on social media, threads emerged around the aesthetics of the perfect dig-
ital eulogy. This largely comprised a visual image and a textual caption. A basic
criterion was that the photograph had to be simultaneously personal and relatable
(Abidin, 2015; Abidin, 2017; Kanai, 2017), representing the poster’s unique and
dyad relationship to the dead, as well as the effervescent affects and sense of rec-
ognition that a social media audience ought to be able to discern.
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 169
For the most part, digital eulogy photographs had to comprise only the
deceased and the poster, preferably looking their best, or encapsulating a par-
ticularly fl attering or happy moment in their time together. Many informants
reported posting images of them on holiday, at school events, or at birthdays
and parties. Some informants exercise another layer of fi ltering which they felt
expressed the hierarchy of their friendship and intimacy with the deceased over
other users, and chose the oldest images they had to convey that they had known
the deceased for much longer and thus felt the grief more strongly.
The textual caption accompanying the photograph was equally important.
Many informants expressed that it was only good decorum to post celebratory
accounts of the deceased, even if they had experienced confl ict in the past. Often,
these were expressions of grief that fl owed naturally with little editing, marking
how the poster felt in that space and time. For instance, Arlene, who says she is
usually not as expressive in her social media posts, tells me that she spent a long
time laboring over an image and caption, and then unexpectedly posted a “very
very long ass [sic] poetic essay” in her moment of vulnerability.
However, on a networked platform where a mass of mutual friends means
that such digital eulogies start surfacing in large numbers and in rapid succession,
young people began to grapple with the authority and affect of their posts. Upon
listening to Cherry and Arlene’s recounts of how they crafted their digital eulo-
gies, and on refl ection of some of the digital eulogies that the three women felt
were insincere, Alyssa solemnly refl ects somewhat apprehensively that the days of
new grief were “just very strange . . . we were talking about how weird it felt that
a lot of people were posting these things online.” Cherry agreed and expressed
that the prolifi cness of the networked grief felt as if the intimacy they genuinely
shared with their deceased friend had been watered down.
In a similar vein, on wrapping up her spiel on the long criteria for a perfect
digital eulogy, Hannah slips into a somber moment and refl exively offers that
such actions may not indicate that posters have “anything to prove.” She argues
that while it is tempting to see such curation of digital eulogies as calculated or
insincere, young people would feel compelled to put in effort to present the
deceased in the best light, posting something that is “accurate and depicts the
friendship as it is.”
Grief Hypejacking
Despite Hannah’s intimately honest and generous assessment, the three women
in the focus group encountered a few instances of “grief hypejacking,” which
I frame as the bandwagoning on high-visibility hashtags or public tributes
where users wrestle to misappropriate highly public channels of collective grief
for self-publicity. This frame posits that grief hypejacking occurs when “public
grieving”—in which users sincerely partake in a global expression, narrative, and
dialogue of a grief event through the use of high-visibility trending hashtags or by
170 Crystal Abidin
partaking in highly visible networks of grief—transits into “publicity grieving”—
in which users opportunistically harness the attention currency of high-visibility
trending hashtags or public tributes to promote their (self-)brand or wares. While
I have discussed and catalogued instances of hashtag grief hypejacking elsewhere
(crystalabidin, 2016), in this section I discuss grief hypejacking as perceived by
young people when self-serving or undeserving others publish digital eulogies.
As mentioned earlier, Alyssa, Arlene, and Cherry felt that many digital eulo-
gies of their late friend were insincere and intentionally crafted for self-attention
through self-pity or over-affi liation. I reproduce below a moment during the
focus group when the three women were especially agitated and pushed through
their sobbing and tears to recount their observations:
ARLENE: I think we were kind of mad at one point because we felt like—it’s
very strange, because we didn’t see just very close friends , we saw like peo-
ple . . . who we felt barely knew her . . . I mean . . . even though you were not
very close to [the person who] passed away, you kind of feel like it affects you,
but it also feels like a bit offensive to . . . you didn’t even know her . . . why
are you capitalizing on someone’s death? . . . [one post said] we [the poster
and the deceased] bumped [into each other] at the toilet once . . . I was legit
like . . . stop it.
CHERRY: . . . also [it’s] because they post [about] the death in [response to]
trends . . . tag, tag, tag.
ALYSSA: I was very offended . . . for me it kind of like sullied the whole thing . . . I feel
it’s ok [to post digital eulogies] but the manner in which they do it . . . I would
say [they’re only feeling] bummed out probably . . . [because they’re posting
things like] “oh my god this girl, even though I didn’t know her . . .”; yeah,
because think about the people who are actually like, mourning for her,
they’re not interested to hear [these].
CHERRY: I’m thinking [that this is what] irks me about the Facebook [eulogy]
posts because, after that I unfollowed a lot of people.
In this exchange, the three women used several descriptors to segment hierar-
chies of affi nity and authorial claims to grief based on a few criteria. The fi rst
rule relates to the status of a digital eulogy poster’s relationship to the deceased.
Posters who belonged to more central and intimate social circles and maintained
more recent and active relationships with the deceased had more right to grief.
“Very close friends” were “actually mourning,” while those who “barely knew
her,” and were “not very close” were perceived as merely feeling “bummed
out” rather than actual grief. The second rule relates to the modality of the digital
eulogy and how it surfaces the affordances of social media. Posters who were
observed utilizing visibility-amplifying social media tools, such as tagging other
users, hashtags, reposting posts, or posting multiple posts in succession, were
perceived to be “capitalizing on” a digital eulogy to gather attention toward
themselves (see also Marwick & Ellison, 2012).
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 171
The third rule relates to the message of the digital eulogy and how sincere it
was perceived to be. Posters who focused the digital eulogy on themselves and
their own feelings, rather than celebrating the qualities of and commemorat-
ing the deceased, were deemed to be insincere, “offensive,” and “sullied” the
experience of networked grief. The fi nal rule relates to hierarchies of friendship
groups among those experiencing networked grief. Posters were expected to
understand that some of them had more authority to grief over others, contin-
gent upon arbitrary measures of affi liation of affect that privileged the longest
friend, closest friend, most frequently co-present friend, most digitally net-
worked friend, romantic interests present and past, to name a few, and that
others were expected to give them precedence, space, and time for their grief to
surface over others.
If these young people come across as fi ercely territorial over the terrain of
digital grieving, or exceedingly protective over the right to circulate digital eulo-
gies in the appropriate mode, medium, and message, it is rightfully because they
are of a cohort for whom relationships with digital technology are functionally
complex, intensely intimate, and highly integrated into everyday life. Above and
beyond relationships with digital media, such strong reactions are also because
this is after all a young person’s fi rst encounter with death, grief, and personal
loss, where congregating in digital spaces has become a fi rst resort and instinctive
reaction to make meaning, fi nd answers, and sooth the self.
Digital Rhythms of Grief
As a segue into closing our conversation and providing opportunities for mutual
aftercare for each other, I asked my informants if they felt distance from their
digital technologies would aid in their recovery. It is at this juncture that I was
privileged to witness the magic of these resilient young people pulling themselves
out of depressive blackholes to ready themselves to function to normative society
again. Solemn faces cheered up, voices adopted an upward infl exion, and narra-
tives became more aspirational than nostalgic.
Alyssa tells me that even though the grief she and her friends feel is still very
real, they are “quite lighthearted” in their approach to life and would intention-
ally meet up to keep each other afl oat by committing to their social routines as if
their deceased friend were still around, and digitally cataloguing these moments
of normalcy on social media to encourage each other and the peers around them.
Luqman tells me that his eventual decision to delete his late partner’s blog—
despite some regret over having lost the backup in his hard drive—was because
he was focused on progressing with life rather than “holding on to the past.”
Syed tells me that his Instagram projects were specifi cally to “document [his]
growth” out of grief, and that deleting the last account was a symbolic act that
he has accumulated strength to “move on” without the deadweight of hurtful
memories in digital artifacts.
172 Crystal Abidin
Contrary to a normative belief that social media disrupts “natural” processes
of grief, in part due to newer affordances such as Facebook’s “Year in Review”
function that has cultivated “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty” by resurfacing old
photos of the deceased on the feeds of the living (Meyer, 2014), young people are
exercising agency, wit, resistance, and self-care in utilizing the rhythms of digital
technology, digital media, and digital life to understand their grief.
I remember that on the morning of my sister’s cremation, I returned to a
WhatsApp groupchat comprising her closest friends from all walks of life asking
for strength. Her friends fl ooded my phone with group photographs, ridiculous
memes, affective emoji, and text. Some reminisced, some humored, some loved,
some prayed. They asked if I can maintain her Facebook account and Twitter
feed. They asked if I can preserve her phone line and email accounts. They asked
if I can mediate their distress by holding these digital spaces for their grief to
unravel as they make sense of loss at such a young age. I promised that I would
do so, and in so doing, my sister would live in everyone’s pockets, through their
digital devices and traces, and be in “every place at once” (Abidin, 2016).
Grief Etiquette
In closing each of these personal interviews and the focus group, I intention-
ally focused on questions on care chains and aftercare, in relation to the loss of
their loved one as well as the process of recounting the grief to me during our
conversations. As a researcher who had recently experienced grief myself, these
emotionally intense conversations were not easy to conduct in person time and
time again, just as it must have been arduous for my informants to be intimately
transparent with a researcher whom they willingly trusted with their public dis-
plays of vulnerability. While this work necessitates laborious mutual care and
self-care, it is undeniably valuable.
This became clearer to me as I began consulting and conversing with health-
care professionals in palliative care. One hospice nurse expressed that as a patient
approaches their end of life, most family members single-heartedly focus all their
effort and affect on that one person, so much so that when the patient passes
away, loved ones are suddenly hit with the grief all at once and are unable to
transit into care for each other, or “care for the living.” In other words, despite
social workers and counselors preaching the value of “care chains” (Hochschild,
2000), many people who are deep in grief about the impending loss of a loved
one simply do not have the mental capacity and physical resources to plan for
aftercare and self-care.
One palliative doctor I spoke to reported seeing an increasing number of
young patients in their late teens or early to mid-twenties. Sorrowfully recount-
ing a memorable incident in which her young patient instructed her to post a
specifi cally worded status update on his Facebook after death, she came to realize
that young people deeply valued their digital estates as platforms to communicate
Young People and Digital Grief Etiquette 173
gratitude and farewells even on their deathbed. In a handful of other instances,
young patients requested that their palliative doctors and counselors add them on
Facebook or read their blog in order to access sentiment they felt incapable of
articulating in person, in physical spaces, via traditional media.
Despite the very crucial work that such palliative staff engage in, much of
this work is negotiated ad hoc on-the-go as they “play by ear.” Most staff do
“what feels right” based on their individual relationships with their patients, or
on their personal concepts of etiquette and ethics. It is at this juncture that the
insights from the young people involved in my project on grief in digital spaces
will certainly help to inform and shape healthcare industry practices on how the
young feel grief, do grief, progress from grief, and grapple with mortality in the
age of the internet.
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