Health Communication

ISSN: 1041-0236 (Print) 1532-7027 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hhth20

Coping With Loss: Mapping Digital Rituals for the

Expression of Grief

Fiorenza Gamba

To cite this article: Fiorenza Gamba (2016): Coping With Loss: Mapping Digital Rituals for the
Expression of Grief, Health Communication, DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2016.1242038

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2016.1242038

Published online: 29 Nov 2016.

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 HEALTH COMMUNICATION
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2016.1242038

Coping With Loss: Mapping Digital Rituals for the Expression of Grief
a,b
Fiorenza Gamba
a
Department of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences, and Information Engineering, University of Sassari; bInstitut de Recherches
Sociologiques (IRS), University of Geneva

ABSTRACT
Although death has been frequently discussed in health communication, there has been a lack of
research on coping with loss. Nevertheless, there are many websites and social network sites that offer
suggestions to people as to how to cope with loss, including sites for support, sharing of experiences,
and expressing grief. This article provides a theoretical understanding of grief by considering it as an
emotional experience in terms of how it is expressed, its consequences, and the confrontation between
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the offline and online grief experience.

One of the most intriguing promises of the digital networked
society is the possibility it offers for sharing knowledge and
information, establishing best practices for a wide variety of
fields and disciplines, and developing high-quality digital con-
tent created by and for users. Citizens, consumers, interest
groups, hobbyists, and private individuals collaborate to pro-
duce commons, the contents of which are to be shared by all
users. Some scholars (O’Reilly, 2006) refer to the collective use
of digital tools such as Web 2.0 and social software as pro-
dusage (Bruns, 2008), a neologism that denotes user-led con-
tent creation and underlines the porosity between the role of
producers and that of users. In contrast to more traditional
models of content production, produsage is characterized by
collaboration between individuals with various levels of exper-
tise. It also entails an explicitly democratic process in which
the participants, simultaneously inhabiting the roles of profes-
sionals and amateurs, contribute to the co-creation and co-
distribution of knowledge.
Digital produsage is widely practiced by communities of
producers or pro-ams, who are defined as “amateurs who
work to [a] professional standard” (Leadbeater & Miller,
2004, p. 12). Those involved in the governance of a commons
and those involved in its knowledge production work together
to share data with other community members. This collabora-
tive behavior is known as Common Science, a term that was
coined in the 16th century in the context of the natural
sciences and was then gradually extended to other disciplines,
including studies of the environment and health (Akrich,
2010). Through such interactive models, each specific field
produces an epistemic community with the primary goal of
producing and mobilizing knowledge by and for the partici-
pants—that is, the community as a whole.
One of the clearest examples of this process comes from
the field of evidence-based medicine, which acquired the
status of a specific medical practice within the scientific dis-
cipline in the late 1980s. Some 10 years later, evidence-based
medicine crossed over into the Internet, a transition that
contributed to the rise of e-health. The shift made it possible
for the public to participate directly in evidence-based health
care by accessing online health databases, a practice that was
later known as “Medicine 2.0” (Eysenbach, 2001). The use of
digital resources for health care has both advantages and
disadvantages. On one hand, it facilitates patients’ access to
vital information. On the other hand, its usefulness is hin-
dered by a number of factors, including the low health literacy
of patients, the frequent irrelevance or low quality of the
information provided, and information overload. Despite
these drawbacks, the Internet is used as an efficient commu-
nication tool to approach health problems (Kim & Grunig,
2011). Discrepancies in the methods of seeking, producing,
sharing, and using health information influence the quality of
information that users obtain. The quality of information may
also vary with language and with users’ level of knowledge
(Tozzi, Carloni, Ciofi Degli Atti, Meloni, & Gamba, 2010).
Kim and Grunig argue that users’ motivations constitute
another important variable because “people selectively invest
their communicative and cognitive resources in a problem,
only when they perceive the effort to be necessary and rele-
vant” (Kim & Grunig, 2011, p. 122).
Literature on health communication has left unanswered
certain questions surrounding the public use of digital
health care information. A recent review of the literature
has provided an exhaustive mapping of the main topics of
digital health communication. The five most popular topics
(in order) are as follows: medical information (21.4%),
AIDS/HIV and safe sex (8.6%), cancer (not including breast
cancer; 7.3%), smoking (7.3%), and general health (6.6%)
(Kim, Park, Yoo, & Shen, 2010, p. 490). Death is not as
frequently discussed in the literature, with the topic of end-
of-life/aging constituting only 2.1% of the literature, and
death/terminality only 1.9%. Grief is totally absent from the
discussion topics, a surprising finding given that grief is a

CONTACT Fiorenza Gamba fiorenza.gamba@gmail.com Polcoming, University of Sassari, Palazzo Zirolia, Piazza dell’Università 10–07100, Sassari 10121, Italy.
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
 2 F. GAMBA
central aspect of life, affecting many—or, arguably, all—
people.
Despite the neglect of grief as a topic in e-health commu-
nities, digital mourning practices represent a growing phe-
nomenon. The profusion in the last 20 years of websites such
as Web Memorial and Virtual Cemeteries (Gamba, 2007;
Roberts & Vidal, 2000) and, more recently, of popular social
network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has
provided individuals with different ways to cope with loss
(Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2012). Digital technology deli-
vers a means of dealing with grief over the loss of loved ones
by allowing individuals to share their thoughts and emotions
with an extended community of mourners.
Mourning in Health Communication
To address the limitation of the absence of grief in health
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communication research and the expansion of digital mourn-
ing rituals, several essential points should be considered.
First, it is possible that grief receives little attention in the
field of health communication because of its contentious
nature in the broader domain of health discourse. On Death
and Dying, a classic study of grief by psychiatrist Elizabeth
Kübler-Ross (1969), suggests that grief is an emotional con-
dition that proceeds in stages; in order for it not to become a
pathological state, the process must be concluded in a timely
way. Kübler-Ross provided a scientific procedure to define the
five stages of grief and to ensure mourners’ recovery within a
set period of time. To encourage them to recover, there are
some underlying social codes surrounding grief. These codes
are particularly evident in the bureaucratization to which
mourning has been subjected since the 20th century, when
rules of industry and everyday life have effectively forbidden
any prolongation of mourning. In the present climate, grief is
often perceived as being a “waste” of time and a destabilizing
interruption of social life (Mellor & Shilling, 1993). Medical
discourse considers grief to be a condition comparable to
other diseases, construing it either as normal or pathological
depending on its duration, the appropriate length of which is
determined by social conventions, rules, or laws.
Consequently, grief is a complex matter in medicine and
health communication. Yet it remains unclear how or even
whether it is a pathological condition. However, people have
long succumbed to the public censure of their emotions. In
this scientific and social context, it is not surprising that grief
has largely remained unacknowledged in medical and popular
conversations.
Second, several studies in the field of psychiatry have
denied that any pathological danger results from protracted
grief; they have claimed, on the contrary, that grief is tanta-
mount to a nonpathological, continuing bond with the
deceased. Such a bond continues in accordance with the
exigencies of the survivor (Klass & Walter, 2001; Neimayer,
Baldwin, & Gillies, 2006), who aims to maintain a relationship
—albeit a transformed one—with the deceased, following the
death. Despite this scientific revision, the conviction that a
lengthy period of grief signals an illness remains tenacious in
the broader culture, especially in organizational work settings,
and is strongly supported by certain voices in popular science.
The domain of health communication demonstrates little
interest in a subject that exhibits no definitive pathology; as a
result, grief is largely normalized in medical discourse. This
normalization, however, is not reflected in broader public
discourse. Still considered to be detrimental to productivity,
grief remains subject to persistent social censorship, regardless
of changes in clinical understandings. In this vexed terrain,
online communities provide a nonpathological space where
participants can freely express grief for any length of time,
and can also find information and support. In this article, I
analyze the diffusion of these spaces of communication, as
well as their shapes and characteristics, in order to provide a
map of this phenomenon.
Research Methods and Questions
Drawing on my own research undertaken from 2004 to 2014,
this review of the profusion and characteristics of digital
mourning rituals focuses on the following elements:
● The transformation of digital mourning over 19 years
(1995–2014).
● The digital map and the categorization of the websites
(i.e., Web Memorial, Web Cemetery, social network
sites, QR codes).
● The characteristics of the rituals (i.e., narrative-based,
ritualistic, hybrid online/offline).
● The kinds of support that people seek.
● The users (i.e., relatives or friends of the deceased, etc.).
● The emotional content of the websites.
● The motivations of users.
These last two points directly relate to my main hypothesis
that mourners’ needs for personalized self-expression draw
them to funereal rituals and online expressions of grief. This
set of needs constitutes part of a more general quest for what
Thomas Luckmann (1967) identifies as a “private system of
ultimate significance” (p. 102). Luckmann claims that indivi-
duals develop a system that he calls the modern sacred, to
guide themselves through the more significant experiences of
life, such as death and grief. People in a postindustrial society
make important decisions not on the basis of a homogeneous
set of values but à la carte, through a combination of princi-
ples derived from different social milieus. In other words,
individuals build systems of meaning in their private, every-
day lives, and then extend them into the social sphere.
Data Collection and Methodology
I compiled a list of websites that contained at least one of the
following key words: dead, death, grief, bond, or mourning. I
also collected a data set obtained from mourners on websites
and documents made available through hyperlinks on the
digital mourning websites. I considered this data alongside
the central research foci noted in the next section. My meth-
odology consisted of virtual ethnography, or, more generally,
virtual methods (Hine, 2000). Such a strategy allows the
observer to apprehend the contemporary cultural practices
surrounding online and offline experiences as they overlap

one another. The digital environment crucially influences the
content of the research, as well as the analysis carried out by
the researcher. In this project, I analyzed the textual and
paratextual elements of content posted by mourners on web-
sites, blogs, discussion forums, and social network sites, with a
focus on both the content of the written texts and the visual
presentation of the material.
Interdisciplinarity
One of most urgent problems of this research was to define its
disciplinary field with precision. Initially, I located the project
exclusively in the field of Internet Studies, but I quickly realized
that it was impossible to circumscribe the analysis in this way. In
fact, the inquiry required a larger interdisciplinary perspective
informed by anthropology (especially ritual studies) (Grimes,
1994), thanatology (Thomas, 1975), sociology, communications
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(including health communications), and psychology.
Spaces for Coping With Loss: A Map of Digital Rituals for
Mourning
The psychological normalization of grief and the search for
personalized ways to express mourning have led to a profu-
sion of websites used by mourners to the commemoration of
departed loved ones. A thorough appraisal of digital mourn-
ing requires more than merely observing its present manifes-
tations; instead, it is necessary to trace its development from
its first appearance.
The First Phase
The first website dedicated to mourning was launched on
April 28, 1995 (Chang & Sofka, 2006; Gamba, 2007). World
Wide Cemetery was created by Canadian engineer Michael
Kibbee, who, having been diagnosed with cancer, hoped to
offer others undergoing loss the chance to communicate and
share. Kibbee’s website features a manifesto on coping with
loss through communication.
When a person we love or are close to dies, the desire to com-
municate our loss is both natural and strong. We use the media—
all forms of print, as well as radio and television—to notify others
of a loved one’s passing. The World Wide Web … is an ideal place
to announce the loss of someone we cherish and to erect a
permanent monument to their memory. Such virtual monuments,
unlike real ones, will not weather with the passage of time and can
be visited easily by people from around the world. Monuments in
the World Wide Cemetery allow people to share the lives of their
loved ones in ways that traditional printed death announcements
or stone inscriptions cannot. Photographs, moving images, and
even sounds can be included with a monument. (Michael Kibbee,
www.cemetery.org/about.html)
A number of similar sites were later launched. In this first
phase of digital mourning, which extends from the birth of
digital rituals in 1995 to the development of “Web 2.0,” three
categories of features were found, including the virtual
Regarding terminology, the use of the term cemetery requires clarification. In their early manifestations, these websites maintained visual references to
1
physical cemeteries as places for commemoration and authorized expression of grief. Such connotations have been abandoned as users have developed
more personalized forms of mourning.
HEALTH COMMUNICATION 3
cemetery video game, the virtual cemetery hypertext, and
the virtual cemetery webpage.1
Virtual Cemetery Video Games
Virtual cemetery video games became a forum for digital
mourning during the rise of Web 2.0. Over time, they have
evolved in terms of designs. Through simple and attractive
graphic animations, they reproduced certain visual and ritual-
related elements of real cemeteries with the use of chromatic
harmonies and interactivity of video games. Their virtual
environments are sometimes informed by narratives drawn
from pagan mythology. Furthermore, these sites encourage
users to perform certain commemorative actions that serve
as personalized expressions of grief, such as laying flowers,
lighting candles, and posting messages.
Virtual Cemetery Hypertexts or Narratives
The second category of commemorative websites uses a
hypertext structure. From an aesthetic point of view, these
sites lack the visual qualities of virtual cemetery video games.
These elements are replaced by an emphasis on the sites’
digital tools, which are accessible through menus, buttons,
and links. Rather than making visual reference to real struc-
tures or physical spaces, hypertext sites offer features such as
links to information and support services, and ways to contact
other users. Some of these websites offer digital versions of
traditional mourning practices. The website “Memory of,” for
instance, gives users the chance to light a virtual candle. For
the most part, however, the virtual cemetery hypertext creates
a rupture with traditional rituals of mourning by focusing on
digital tools that allow mourners to create personalized nar-
ratives that encompass the biography of the deceased and the
experiences of grieving relatives and friends.
A vital element uncovered by this study is the capacity of
such sites to foster a connection between users that expands
both on the Web and in physical reality. These websites
connect people who are sharing the same experience—that
is, the loss of a loved one—and are searching for the same
type of support. In such cases, hypertextual links connect
users not only to information, but also to each other. In
addition to sharing data such as photos, videos, and texts
about the deceased, users host forums, chats, and blogs
where relatives, friends, and experts participate. Moreover,
the connections established online sometimes extend offline,
producing interactions and relationships in the nondigital
world. In this way, the exchanges made online continue
through face-to-face meetings, events, and help groups that
bring users together. These more personalized websites offer
users/mourners the chance to upload digital data concerning
the dead, to commemorate them with messages, and to update
friends and acquaintances about recent uploads and initia-
tives. In addition, some sites offer links to online and offline
services that include bibliographic resources, services for grief
 4 F. GAMBA
support and education (“ShareGrief”), and practical informa-
tion about funeral and cremation arrangements (“US Funeral
On Line”). Finally, the sites allow announcements, such as
private or public remembrance ceremonies and conferences,
to be made.
Virtual Cemetery Personal Pages and Individual Web
Memorials
The virtual cemetery hypertext provides users with a perso-
nalized method for coping with loss. These websites have
become unique spaces for mourners to upload a biography
of the deceased and to collaborate on a composite memorial
that is both personal and collective. This practice finds its
most fully realized form in the virtual cemetery personal
webpage, a format that represents a fundamental transition
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in the history of digital mourning. Burgeoning in the second
half of the 2000s, these sites arose by virtue of Web 2.0, a form
of Internet design based on a simplified technological inter-
face that enables a wider range of users to create and manage
websites. Web 2.0 technology has been deemed “participative”
and is associated with grass-roots management and distribu-
tion. This digital transformation facilitates personalization
and, in the context of mourning, allows for freer and less
formal expression than that permitted by social conventions.
Mourners can design and manage their own independent
websites, or they can choose to have their sites hosted by
another website. Both models assign the final administration
of content to individual users who determine every aspect of
their own webpage, from its visual appearance to its digital
functions. Because of the vast degree of freedom allotted to
the designer, each website will reflect a unique combination of
traditional and non-traditional references and narrative func-
tions, depending on the preferences of the individual mour-
ner. From this type of website emerges another essential
transformation in the experience and communication of
grief. Websites, which are created from the personal histories
of the dead, simultaneously present a space for the mourner’s
own self-expression. Each user comes to the website with his
or her own personal values and concerns, seeking a time, a
space, and a personally satisfactory mode by which to cele-
brate the memory of his or her loved one. These websites
provide free access to different forms of commemoration and
allow mourners to establish connections with each other,
thereby reflecting the highest ideals of sharing communities.
In this process of communication and exchange, the mourner/
user can engage in active self-expression and allow others to
do so as well. On the one hand, the mourner could commu-
nicate his or her own feelings about his loss and find support
from others touched by a similar experience; on the other
hand, the mourner could offer other users, such as friends or
strangers, a place to share their grief and to find support.
In two messages posted on one website by the parents of an
adolescent who committed suicide, the couple expresses a
combination of their pain, their need for support, and their
2
Viewed April 19, 2007.
Kasket has proposed distinguishing such relational proximity with the terms Khim (to indicate that the visitor knew the deceased), DKhim (to indicate that
3
the visitor did not know the deceased), and DKhim well (to indicate that the visitor did not know the deceased well) (Kasket, 2009).
need for personal testimony. The first message emphasizes the
need to communicate the pain of loss in a narrative form:
We both cried then together, memories of the past and regrets for
the future filling the emptiness and the void in our lives, most
especially on this day. We consoled each other by sharing our
thoughts, our tears and our memories. How badly we wanted to
have our son back in our lives and on this day, having him
spiritually with us in Colorado, just was not enough.
The second message indicates a desire to share with other
families in the hopes of helping them:
Nothing can ever bring back our ***. Nothing will ever heal our
broken hearts. But we hope by sharing the personal details of our
tremendous loss, another family will have been spared a lifelong
sentence to this kind of pain.2
The Second Phase
The second phase in the history of digital mourning is for-
mally coincident with the spread of Web 2.0, a development
that provided several groundbreaking platforms for the crea-
tion, sharing, and distribution of content. These platforms are
better known as social network sites (SNSs) (boyd & Ellison,
2008). They are often described in terms of their promotion of
common spaces and sharing, the variety of the content avail-
able for sharing (e.g., texts, videos, photos, and audio files),
and the diverse areas of experience reflected in that content
(e.g., leisure, work, joy, anger, faith, emotion, cognition, and
pain). Unsurprisingly, death and grief have also found a place
in SNSs. In my research on this second phase, I analyzed SNSs
that have developed forms of grieving, including Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube, sites for managing specific data
(Carrol & Romano, 2011), and specific technologies like QR
codes that are applied to commemoration rituals.
Facebook
Facebook’s primary use as a digital tool for grieving comes in
the form of user accounts that have been given the status “In
Memoriam.” In such a circumstance, the website administra-
tor and the family of the deceased agree that the account of
the deceased shall be locked (i.e., no one can log into the site
with the identity of that account holder), but relatives and
users will be able to post messages, upload files, and add links
to the account page. Facebook grieving activities do not differ
greatly from those observed on a personal webpage; in either
case, users can visit the page regardless of whether they did or
did not know the deceased. Nevertheless, there are several
noteworthy features. First, the Facebook account frequently
underlines the various degrees of emotional proximity
between users and the deceased, which often emerge in textual
messages.3 Second, as a digital trace of the deceased, the
Facebook account allows families and friends to mourn with
their circles of users. Facebook provides a means for such
users to maintain a personal relationship with the deceased
and his or her network (Odom, Harper, Sellen, Kirk, & Banks,

2010, p. 7–8). An asymmetrical relationship between the
deceased and his or her relatives emerges through digital
memorialization practices, and the narrative of mourning
reflects multiple, collaborative voices. In this way, grieving
becomes a communication activity performed through writ-
ing, through using the “digital remains” of the dead (i.e., the
content of the Facebook account) as a supporting memory or
sentimental artifact (Kirk & Sellen, 2010), and through
exchanging and sharing emotions and digital contents with
other mourners and users.
Twitter
Because of its post size limit of 140 characters, Twitter does not
allow for the composition of an extensive narrative; thus, it is not
an effective means of sharing the continued emotions of loss
during the mourning process, even if it can expand its narrative
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space through the inclusion of hyperlinks. However, it allows the
collective and global expression of emotion after the deaths of
celebrities. One of the most striking examples was the death of
Steve Jobs: Within 24 hours, there were 3,500,000 tweets expres-
sing the wish that he would rest in peace.
YouTube
YouTube is a largely heterogeneous website that contains
many items concerning death, the dead, illness, commemora-
tion, and grief,4 each of which can be considered a practice of
“cybermourning.” The most salient element of YouTube as a
tool of mourning is the power of images in communicating
grief. In fact, the site has a considerable number of videos
indexed under the category of death and loss, the purpose of
which is to let the images speak so as to share the feelings
accompanying different experiences of death. Indeed, the
videos, combined with viewers’ comments, reflect common
processes for coping with loss. The immediateness of the
video format accentuates the connection between the mour-
ners and the users who show them support. Users express
their care differently depending on their own emotional
proximity to the deceased and on the type of loss. For exam-
ple, a memorial video made by the mother of a deceased
infant elicited the following comments from users: “dear
sweet family …. I lost an infant boy also. I know exactly
how you feel and what you and your family are going
through,” “my heart breaks for you and your wonderful
family, [sic] Tears roll down my face as I read your story,”
“beautiful video in memory of your beautiful baby girl. My
heart goes out to you and your family!,” and “I just want to
share with you that you all are in my heart, thoughts &
prayers. I cannot imagine how you have coped.”5
In such instances, YouTube enables a full visual display of
the mourner’s grief on an intimate and personal level. The
phenomenon can be usefully understood through Serge
Tisseron’s reinterpretation of extimacy, a term coined by
Jacques Lacan (Tisseron, 2011) to indicate needs that can be
4
I analyzed 48 YouTube videos pertaining to grief over the loss of infants, children, and young adolescents, 36 of whom were girls and 12 of whom were
boys.
5
Viewed May 15, 2014.
HEALTH COMMUNICATION 5
satisfied by sharing one’s experience and receiving a collective
consolation from one’s community (Wahlberg, 2010). The
power of images—in this case, in the form of videos—to
arouse shared emotions is mobilized through a combination
of private and public means. The video memorial is a narra-
tive of the mourner’s personal experience that allows the
mourner to mark a continuing bond with the deceased; this
bond is shared with a grieving community that recognizes
itself in this experience.
Gibson and Altena (2013) have analyzed this attitude in a
video created by a daughter in memory of her father, which
contains film from important moments in his life and his
illness. The video exceeds the boundaries of personal experi-
ence and speaks to a wider social context as it extends into
other social networks. One might also take the example of a
daughter who has filmed her mother’s death in order to
support a campaign for the implementation and improvement
of palliative care. Thus, grief can be expressed in both the
private and public spheres: While the emotional bonds are
evident in the expression of private grief, a grief community
and, more widely, the society represented by the website’s
users are involved in the debate surrounding palliative care.
Videos do not always contain high narrative coherence.
Slideshows, for instance, cannot be classified as visual story-
telling, since the images are only photos and are thus difficult
to interpret. However, for mourners, they are a simple,
immediate, and powerful way of communicating grief. In a
slideshow memorial created by the sister of a deceased adoles-
cent girl, viewers are given no indication about the history of
the deceased; instead, we see the young girl, her face, her “joie
de vivre.” The images passing over the screen conjure emotions
directly, without mediation, and communicate the feelings of
the mourner. They demonstrate two central characteristics:
They are intended to express the mourner’s grief and his or
her intimate bond with the deceased, and they are meant to be
shared as a means of digital support (Gamba, 2015).
Discussion
The historical/typological mapping of digital mourning rituals
presented in this article analyzes digital mourning websites
based on the intersection of two factors. The first factor is my
preliminary hypothesis that such sites allow personal expres-
sions of grief. The second factor is a consideration of the
tenets underlying produsage, a digitally collaborative behavior
model in which participants develop and share a body of
knowledge (such as the content of a website). This intersec-
tion has shed light on a number of features integral to digital
mourning: a nonpathological perspective of grief, a persona-
lization of practices concerning death, dying, and grieving,
and a circulation of the principles of Common Science in a
wide and generalized sense.
We can observe these conditions in the behaviors that
consumers, citizens, patients, and, of course, mourners exhibit
in their everyday lives both online and offline. People search
 6 F. GAMBA
for common spaces of exchange in order to find sharing and
support—that is, community. Such a quest does not negate
the importance of institutional or professional support in the
form of health care services or grief psychologists, but it offers
a means of personalized coping by way of a continuing,
shared, and narrative bond. As Cecilia Bosticco and Teresa
Thompson have argued, storytelling and narrative play
important roles in coping with grief, which they term a
fundamental human process; the significance of these meth-
ods is discussed in much work on death, dying, grieving, and
bereavement (Bosticco & Thompson, 2005, p. 1). Narrative is
a form of grieving that perpetuates the bonds between mour-
ners and the dead and between mourners themselves. The
participative environment of the Web is well suited to narra-
tive mourning, particularly as it plays out via social platforms
where collaborative storytelling produces a narrative that is
co-constructed by multiple narrators (Georgakopoulou, 2007).
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The task of mapping websites that host grieving rituals
prompted me to delineate certain narrative shapes and com-
municative attitudes frequently adopted by mourners. The
grief narratives produced on the Web are rarely exclusively
textual; instead, they often demonstrate a blend of textual and
visual elements in variable combinations, ranging from the
written texts of virtual cemetery hypertexts, where the visual
contents are extremely simple, to the YouTube video memor-
ial, where written contents (when they are present) are
restricted to the comments section. One of the most relevant
keys to understanding the role of narrative in digital mourn-
ing is the connection that narrative fosters among the perso-
nalized expression of grief, the author’s expression of identity,
and the act of sharing with a grief community.
The communication of emotions associated with death is
an important element of the personalization of grief. Using
digital tools, mourners are able to achieve personalized
expression of the upsetting emotions and feelings that accom-
pany the loss of a loved one, thereby attaining, at their own
pace, the transformation of grief into memory. The texts that
emerge in these venues constitute symbolic, multivalent nar-
ratives that include the biography of the deceased and the
experiences and emotions of the mourners. The proportions
of these elements depend on the personal choices of users as
they commemorate the dead with recorded fragments that
recreate each identity. The grief narrative of digital rituals is
primarily a potential space of expression for its author, a
person with a hierarchy of individual values and preferences
who is troubled by loss and seeks out a time, a place, and a
personal mode by which to grieve and celebrate the memory
of the deceased with relatives, friends, and even strangers.
Grief narratives are concerned not only with the deceased but
also with the circumstances of the death and the emotional bonds
between the author and the departed. In their research, de Vries
and Rutherford (2004) extract from these texts some recurrent
themes: the expression of sadness or loss, a reflection on the cause
of death, religious references, a belief that contact with the
deceased endures, and the hope to reunite with the departed in
the afterlife. Themes of guilt, gratitude, peace, and anger recur
more sporadically, but also with more intensity.
The forms that grief narratives take, especially in the first phase
of the history of digital ritual, are letters, obituaries, and tributes,
each with its own style. Letters addressed to the deceased are the
most personal expressions of mourners’ emotions, communicat-
ing their moods and providing the deceased with information
about their everyday activities. Several researchers (Gamba, 2007;
Roberts & Vidal, 2000) note that the letter is an essential frame
with which to express grief because it represents a narrative that
can be continuously updated according to the needs of the mour-
ner, thereby creating a continuing bond.
By contrast, obituaries are narratives that describe the life
of the deceased, his or her qualities, and his or her personality.
They are narratives of memory in which the expression of
emotions consolidates the bond between the mourners and
the deceased. The texts provide a portrait of the dead, often
explaining his or her influence on the life of the mourners, his
or her importance as model of behavior, and the position that
he or she occupied for others. Finally, tributes are more
formal narratives that contain very distilled information and
may solely be comprised of a short note about the deceased.
This analysis of the shape of grief narratives draws particu-
larly, but not exclusively, on websites from the first phase of
digital mourning. These narrative shapes represent the original
nucleus from which the others shapes have arisen. The most
relevant development in digital mourning does not concern the
structure of messages, but their composition. There is an increas-
ingly communal aspect to the composition of memorial texts, as
seen in the dialogical shape of co-constructed narratives that
appear on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Two factors specific to the second phase of digital rituals of
mourning deserve special consideration. First, the different
narrative shapes are mixed because of the structures on dif-
ferent social platforms. Facebook, for example, gathers shorter
forms of tribute in the comments; however, longer narratives,
such as letters, can be made available through hyperlinks.
The second new element is the use of visual apparatus in
the grief narrative to lend immediacy and power to the emo-
tions communicated. YouTube contains an archive with a
considerable number of indexed videos on death and grief
that aim to let the images speak in order to represent different
experiences of death. The use of visual elements in digital
mourning has grown rapidly with the sharing of images and
videos. Nevertheless, their use can create problems of inter-
pretation, not only because it may be difficult to identify their
content, but also because of the contrasting emotions that this
content can produce. While images provide a sense of imme-
diacy, they can also shock and confuse users.
A final element may be considered: Who is the user of the
digital rituals of mourning? An inquiry undertaken by de Vries
and Rutherford in 2004 profiled the users of virtual cemeteries and
individual Web memorials. Among their findings was the discov-
ery that women are more largely represented in digital mourning
communities, a fact that the authors attribute to sociocultural
norms that sanction and encourage women’s emotional self-
expression (Sanders, 1998). They also found that the children of
the deceased constitute the largest group of online mourners,
which could be caused by an age-dependent digital literacy. The
authors suggest that the personalization of grief is a determining
element that changes the characteristics of these profiles. As par-
ents of the deceased come to represent a larger percentage of digital
mourners, corresponding differences appear in the content, style,

and general perspective informing the sites. For instance, in a
website dedicated to deaths by suicide, the authors are often the
parents of the deceased. Another element to consider is the rapid
transformation of the Web environment and its tools, a flux that
produces a multiplicity of shapes and opportunities whereby the
contemporary grief community may engage in new forms of
digital interaction (Walter, 2013).
Conclusion
The focus of this article has been on mapping digital rituals of
mourning, including their underlying assumptions, types, and
narrative shapes. The analysis and the framework signal an
increasing profusion of these digital tools for coping with loss
and reflect a growing interest in the subject, such as the
emergence of the scholarly network on death online research.
This topic could be further developed with further inquiries
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 06:22 06 August 2017
on coping with loss and maintaining bonds established online
in the offline world (Julier-Costes, 2012).
Acknowledgments
This article was developed based on my habilitation thesis submitted to
the University of Strasbourg in December 2014. I extend much gratitude
to Professor David Le Breton for his patient guidance.
ORCID
Fiorenza Gamba http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8502-0101
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