Abstract

RAMOS, Hugo. Beyond the Grave on Facebook: Life after Death and Mourning in the Digital Age. OBS* [online]. 2015, vol.9, n.4, pp.31-50. ISSN 1646-5954.

This article promotes the debate about a relatively recent area of study of social sciences: death studies. Our digital identities are the result of the interaction between our social behaviour and technology and survive our biological bodies. In what way do we transpose the daily acts and rituals to the digital world? What differences were allowed by this transposition? In what way did the participatory culture influence the power relations and democratise the mourning process? How do our identities persist in a timeless context? Through this analysis we will see how social media expand public mourning and death rituals in temporal, spatial and social ways, not in disruption with traditional social means but as a complement in a way only possible in the Network Society Age.

Keywords : death; mourning; memorial; collective memory; persistence of identity; surveillance; digital enclosure; Facebook.

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