Chapter 11

Death, Emotion and Digital Media

Tim Hutchings

Introduction: Mediating Grief

Death and bereavement are particularly interesting areas of study during times of
cultural change, life events during which we may expect to see new practices and ideas
embraced or resisted. This chapter focuses on the significance of digital media in
contemporary bereavement practices, activities that traditionally have involved much
attention to the management and expression of emotion. I will examine a range of practices –
including funerals in online communities, news-sharing, cybermemorials and the use of
social network sites – to investigate some of the ways in which ‘emotional repertoires’1 are
being preserved and transformed as digital media take on increasingly central roles in our
daily lives.

Death and Emotion

Emotions, according to Davies, are ‘socially named feelings’.2 Groups organise
feelings into categories, and mapping these categories offers ‘an important means of
understanding how [the group] views the world and directs its members in their approach to
their environment.’ These categories constitute the ‘emotional repertoire’ of the group. Each
individual develops their own personal repertoire, in greater or lesser alignment with the
shared repertoire of the group. The socialisation of new members of a group partly involves
learning which elements of the group’s emotional repertoire to perform in a given context.
The emotional structure of a group focuses particularly around that group’s core values, and
relating closely to those values and their associated emotions is one factor that leads to a
strong sense of group identity.3 Socialization, of course, is rarely completely successful:
different individuals will internalise group expectations to different degrees, just as they feel
different degrees of identification.
Death threatens the community with dissolution, ending the participation of a group
member and terminating relationships. Relationships with important others provide us with
security, meaning and hope and play a crucial role in generating our sense of identity. 4
Bereavement for many individuals is experienced as a personal loss that provokes intense
feelings of grief, undermines any sense of meaning in life and leaves the bereaved at least
temporarily unable to continue their participation in everyday activities. This threat must be
overcome if the bereaved are to remain active contributors to the group, and multiple public
and private practices therefore emerge at times of bereavement to manage and control the
grieving process.
The role of emotions and values in generating identity is intensified at moments of
ritual. Communal worship is an example of this kind of “rite of intensification”, repeated
regularly in most religious traditions to reinforce associations between group values,
emotions, ideas and membership (p38). Storytelling can also function in this way, generating
narratives and ‘paradigmatic scenes’ that ‘compress complex ideas into easily remembered

1
Douglas James Davies, Emotion, Identity, and Religion : Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.
2
Ibid., 16.
3
Ibid., 18.
4
Ibid., 97.
storylines and poignant symbolic motifs that become a paradigm, a model of and for that
worldview’.5 Sharing these narratives encourages group members to frame their own personal
stories within the world view, value system and emotional repertoire of the group.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, communities turn to ritual and storytelling at times of
bereavement to reassert their shared values and manage the danger posed by grief. The
emotional repertoire of the group plays a crucial role here, instructing members in the
appropriate patterns of speech, dress and activity that must be upheld during times of
bereavement, in what contexts they must be deployed and how long they should be
maintained. Some feelings and expressions are validated and others marginalised or censored.

Theories of Technology, Culture and Change

Heidi Campbell’s recent work on the “religious social shaping of technology”6
suggests that we should expect a considerable degree of continuity in these emotion
management systems as grief moves online. Campbell’s research demonstrates that the
material form, social status and uses of new devices and services is not pre-determined. Form
and function are established iteratively over time, in dialogue between designers,
manufacturers, marketers, consumers, interest groups, governments and other stakeholders.
Consumers frame technologies within discourses of appropriate use, demand modifications,
and in some cases reject them altogether. To be successful, a new technology must be
accepted by users, and that means it mustn’t appear to threaten their values.
Religious groups play a distinctive role in this shaping process, according to
Campbell, because their evaluation of new technologies relies not only on perceptions of
practical value and social impact but also on their compatibility with a religious tradition.
Religious communities turn to their sacred texts and their history of technology use to help
them evaluate new technologies. Just like other consumer groups, religious communities have
sometimes pressured producers to create new devices that are better suited to their needs. In
other cases, religious groups have relied on their traditions to help develop conversations
about how to use technology effectively and safely.
If we apply Campbell’s approach to the case of bereavement, it appears that the most
successful new technologies will be those that support rather than transform common modes
of grieving. The bereaved and the organisations that cater to them will make use of digital
media in ways that are consistent with their values, including the range of emotional
expression they consider appropriate to mourning. Communities validate particular feelings
and displays of feeling during times of mourning, and they will find ways to use new
technology within the same distinctive emotional repertoires.
The concept of “media logic” suggests an alternative possibility. In the late 1970s,
David Altheide and Robert Snow suggested that the institutions of American society,
including politics, sport and religion, were being transformed by their immersion in media
culture.7 Communicators had changed the content, style and emotional tone of their messages
and their definition of communication success to meet the demands of the media they were
using. Organisations wishing to communicate with television audiences, for example, were
forced to provide continual visual interest, to focus on entertainment, to employ large
departments devoted to excellence in television production and to pursue the quantified
measure of success generated by the ratings systems. Events or discourses that could not meet
these requirements ceased to be televised.
Stig Hjarvard has recently revitalised the idea of “media logic” as a core component
of his concept of “mediatisation”, a process of societal change driven by the adoption of
5
Ibid., 42.
6
Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
7
David L Altheide and Robert P Snow, Media logic (London: Sage, 1979).
media logic by institutions.8 According to Hjarvard, mediatisation has impacted religion on
three levels. The media now produce and circulate religious information and experiences;
religious themes are appropriated and remoulded into content for the media’s own story-
telling; and the media has become an environment that performs certain functions previously
taken on by religion. Through these processes, ‘the institutional, aesthetic and technological
characteristics of the media influence the framing of religion and the ways that audiences and
users are supposed to interact with religion’.9
Altheide and Snow and Hjarvard all focus on print and broadcast media, where
control over the means of production and circulation is tightly centralised and regulated, but
their arguments can also be applied to the more fluid, grassroots communications supported
by digital media. Even online, communication must meet audience expectations, adapt to
software and hardware limitations and comply with the requirements of companies that own
software, sites and data.
The idea of “media logic” suggests that the agency of consumers and communicators
may be more restricted than Campbell’s model suggests. Religious communities do have
some power to shape the technologies they use, but that power is limited by institutional
systems of media production and distribution and by the expectations of audiences. The
media can even serve as competitors, developing their own content with spiritual or
supernatural themes – a phenomenon Hjarvard refers to as “banal religion”.10 If we apply this
approach to bereavement, we can expect to see considerable transformations in grief practices
and communication. Groups must look for ways to adapt their emotional repertoires to meet
the requirements of new media logics.
This chapter will examine the significance of these contrasting approaches for our
understanding of the role of emotions in contemporary mediations of death and mourning.
Individuals, communities and organisations are reshaping digital media to find support and
express their bereavement, but the patterns of contemporary grief are shifting under the
influence of digital media logic. I will explore this double theme through three case studies,
examining online funerals, online cemeteries and the role of social network sites, before
concluding with a discussion of the degree to which these mediated phenomena may be
changing the emotional repertoires and spiritual imagination of contemporary communities.

Digital Media in Everyday Life: Dying, Funerals, Obituaries and Memorials

Communications media play an important role in almost every network in
contemporary society, including friendship groups, businesses, churches and families.
Letters, telephone calls, text messages, emails and Facebook updates are all deployed to
manage relationships, helping to maintain ties and organise shared activities. Media have also
been absorbed into practices of bereavement and mourning, functioning alongside organised
events and informal face-to-face interactions. As digital media are integrated into networks
and communities, a new set of mediated grief practices have emerged to meet specific needs
and complement older media and face-to-face interactions. This section will illustrate some
of these new practices, covering the dying process, the obituary, the funeral and postmortem
memorials.
Technology can connect a dying person to friends, family and online audiences,
helping to share information and access emotional support. Elizabeth Drescher has published
an account of the death of one of her students, Kirstin, and argues that ‘the practice of
blogging… can be one of integration, both personal and social, overcoming the separation

8
Stig Hjarvard, “The Mediatisation of Religion: Theorising Religion, Media and Social Change,”
Culture & Religion 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–135.
9
Ibid., 126.
10
Ibid., 128.
and isolation that previously characterized the existences of the sick and dying.’ 11 Following
her diagnosis of cancer, Kirstin used her blog for two years to share a mixture of everyday
details, spiritual reflections, health updates and prayer requests. Kirstin also used Facebook in
the same way, and ‘friends across the country and around the world’ responded by offering
‘prayers, good wishes, inspirational photographs, videos, music, and so on’.12 When Kirstin
announced her decision to stop chemotherapy and move to a hospice, ‘the Facebook wall
became something of a sanctuary, a vigil site’ of constant prayer and mutual support -
‘members of her community engaged not only Kirstin herself, but each other, forming a
network of care that, to a large extent, continued to extend support after her death.’13
At the very end of Kirstin’s life, a close friend took over the duty of publishing
updates and communicating messages to her, acting as the intermediary between Kirstin and
her online audience. ‘The prayers meant so much to her,’ the friend explained to Drescher.
‘Kirstin knew she is not alone… It was like the whole cloud of witnesses was with us both at
the end of her life.’14
A similar story is told by Jane Moore, without this Christian theological framing. In
Moore’s autobiographical case study, she and her two sisters set up a blog to share
information with their family after their mother entered hospital. This family also used Skype
extensively to allow the dying woman to spend time with her children and grandchildren
across the country. Moore ‘sat with her using Skype to be present at her death’, and praises
the opportunity ‘to “be there”, to say those important words, and to feel connected at the end
of life.’15
Digital media have also led to resurgence in one much older form of bereavement
practice. Many Victorian families commissioned photographs of their dead, particularly
children, dressed and posed as if they were merely asleep. A number of hospitals and
voluntary organisations now offer a contemporary version of this service to families after
still-births or infant deaths. Where necessary, Photoshop is used to remove all visible traces
of medical intervention, to ‘document what would previously have been impossible to show
and create a sanitized view of a traumatic reality’.16
Another traditional bereavement role for communications technology is the sharing of
news. Death announcements and obituaries are published in newspapers and featured on
television and radio, often including accounts of the emotional reactions of families, friends
and the public. Media logic is clearly apparent here in the difference of speed and depth of
coverage observable between technologies, programme genres and channels, and in the kinds
of unspoken information that an audience accustomed to death news can infer beyond what is
explicitly stated.
Digital media impact news sharing in three important ways. News can spread
extremely quickly online; anyone can publish it; and audiences can add their own responses.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, worldwide eagerness for information caused such a
spike in traffic to news websites that CNN later ran the headline “Michael Jackson dies,

11
Elizabeth Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine: The Mediation of Illness, Dying, and Death in the
Digital Age,” CrossCurrents 62, no. 2 (2012): 212.
12
Ibid., 214.
13
Ibid., 215.
14
Ibid.
15
Jane Moore, “Being There: Technology at the end of Life’,” in Dying, Death, and Grief in An Online
Universe : For Counselors and Educators, ed. Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe Cupit, and Kathleen R Gilbert (New
York: Springer Pub., 2012), 82.
16
Angela Ruechers, “Eternal Recall: Memorial Photos in the Digital Environment” (presented at the
Computer-Human Interaction, Atlanta, 2010), dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers. p1.
almost takes internet with him”.17 Fans took to social media to share their grief, forming
temporary communities of mourning where their emotions could be validated.1819
Communication technology also played a role in the funeral event. Jackson’s death
was marked by a memorial service attended by 17,000 fans, many of whom used Twitter to
publish their own running commentary. Whitney Houston’s funeral was broadcast on the
internet, just as state funerals are broadcast on television,20 and webcasts are now offered as
an extra service by a number of funeral organisers.21 As Brian de Vries and Susan Moldaw
point out, webcasting could be a valuable service in a world of international mobility: ‘as
families and social networks become more geographically dispersed and find it harder to
travel to the location of a funeral, webcasting allows everyone to participate’.22
Online memorials offer a more permanent online space for the bereaved to express
and manage their grief, and – like webcasts – can be accessed even by mourners unable to
visit the physical grave. A considerable number of websites – muchloved.com,
gonetoosoon.org, last-memories.com – now function as cemeteries and multi-media books of
remembrance. Memorial-builders are encouraged to use these sites to publish a collection of
different media forms – video, music, photographs, poetry – and visitors are invited to add
their own responses. Small ritual acts may also be offered, including the chance to light
digital candles and leave virtual flowers. Pamela Roberts has surveyed creators of memorial
pages and reports that most visited frequently, updating each time.23 Almost all had told
someone else about the memorial, and most had sat beside another person to guide them
through the site.
Online memorials also offer an opportunity to connect to a wider audience with
similar experiences. Some visitors are close friends and family, but Roberts’ research found
that almost half of all comments on cemetery memorial books were written by strangers. This
can be particularly important for individuals dealing with specific forms of grief, helping
them to contact others who have shared experiences that offline friendship networks might be
unable or unwilling to respond to. Tom Golden, founder of Web Healing, quotes one
memorial creator’s description of a visit:
It was a very special feeling. I felt as if I was entering a sanctuary. I’ve read the other stories before,
often bursting into tears, feeling their grief and loss reflected in my own. Now reading about my
experience with my own words, I feel affinity to a group of people scattered all over the world, linked by
the common human experience of the loss of someone related to them with bonds stronger than death .24

Of course, not every encounter with an online memorial is so emotionally uplifting.

17
Linnie Rawlinson and Nick Hunt, “Jackson Dies, Almost Takes Internet with Him,” CNNTech, June
26, 2009, http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-26/tech/michael.jackson.internet.
18
Tim Hutchings, “Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet’,” in Emotion,
Identity, and Death : Mortality Across Disciplines, ed. Douglas James Davies and Chang-Won Park (Surrey:
Ashgate, 2012).
19
Jimmy Sanderson and Pauline Hope Cheong, “Tweeting Prayers and Communicating Grief Over
Michael Jackson Online,” Bulletin of Science Technology and Society (2010): 30, 328–340.
20
KABC-TV, “Whitney Houston’s Friends, Family Say Goodbye”, February 18, 2012,
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/entertainment&id=8549082.
21
Kathleen Gilbert and Michael Massimi, “From Digital Divide to Digital Immortality:
Thanatechnology at the Turn of the 21st Century,” in Dying, Death, and Grief in An Online Universe : For
Counselors and Educators, ed. Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe Cupit, and Kathleen R Gilbert (New York: Springer,
2012), 20.
22
Brian de Vries and Susan Moldaw, “Virtual Memorials and Cyber Funerals: Contemporary
Expressions of Ageless Experiences,” in Dying, Death, and Grief in An Online Universe : For Counselors and
Educators, ed. Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe Cupit, and Kathleen R Gilbert (New York: Springer, 2012), 142.
23
Pamela Roberts, “From My Space to Our Space: The Functions of Web Memorials in Bereavement,”
The Forum 32, no. 4 (2006), 1-4.
24
Tom Golden, “Healing and the Internet,” The Forum 32, no. 4 (2006), 8.
Stefan Egglestone has written a moving account of his own experience with the memorial
page of a memorial created for a close friend. He browsed the site almost every day, reading
the messages uploaded by others, but couldn’t bring himself to write, handicapped partly by a
concern that he did not have the right to express his feelings publicly. Eventually, he forced
himself to add a message, justifying this as a sign of support for the family and a way to
affirm his own place within his friendship network. Egglestone was able to return to the
memorial years later to re-read those messages, an ‘intense emotional experience’ which
‘allowed me to connect to emotions that had been buried during a difficult time and to release
them a process which helped my mental state considerably.’25

Death and Grief in Online Communities

Web memorials serve a dual function, addressing both close friends and unknown
strangers. Memorials also appear among communities whose primary interaction occurs
online, and here – just as in local communities – periods of bereavement are marked by
efforts to reassert community values, manage the expression of emotion and construct an
accepted memorial narrative of the life and character of the deceased.
Because of this, death played a distinctive role among early studies of online
communities, including online religion. The emotions expressed and events organised by
community members in response to the death of a friend are cited by a number of writers as
evidence that the online network really is a “community”, a network of relationships that
matter - perhaps more so than the relationships formed by the deceased offline. For David
Lochhead, for example, it was the impressive online funeral service organised by a
Presbyterian group after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986 that ‘demonstrated the
power of the computer medium to unite a community in a time of crisis beyond the limits of
geography or denomination.’26 I’ll illustrate this theme here with four examples, each
demonstrating the power of bereavement to crystallise key themes and tensions in the culture
of an online community.
Between 2006 and 2010, I conducted an ethnographic study of an “online church”
called St Pixels. St Pixels was founded in 2004, with a grant from the Methodist Church, and
grew into a community of regular participants that continues to exist today. The strength of
the connections formed between members has been crucial to the durability of the church,
and we see this strength revealed with particular clarity at times of bereavement.
Mark Howe, one of St Pixel’s leaders, has written an account of the events that
followed the death of a member he calls T:
T was a regular participant in St Pixels… Then, suddenly, T stopped logging in. One of our members
managed to piece together the story from local newspaper reports. T had been injured in an accident and
died of complications a few weeks later. His funeral had been conducted by a minister he had never met.
Another member contacted the family, who were unaware of T’s involvement in St Pixels, and asked if
they would be happy for the community to hold a virtual memorial service. The family agreed, and
registered on the website in order to attend. One Saturday evening, T’s virtual friends gathered in the
sanctuary to share their stories about T and to pay their last respects.27

In this tale, we see a barrier between T’s online and offline relationships broken down by
bereavement. T himself apparently had no desire to introduce his family to his online
activities, but after his disappearance his online friends used information he had revealed to

25
Stefan Rennick Egglestone, “Online Memorials: a Personal Experience” (presented at the Computer-
Human Interaction, Atlanta, 2010), Available online from dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers.
26
David Lochhead, Shifting Realities : Information Technology and the Church (Geneva: WCC
Publications, 1997), 52.
27
Mark Howe, Online Church? First Steps Towards Virtual Incarnation (Cambridge: Grove Books,
2007).
find out what had happened and contact his family. T’s online funeral brought his online
friends together with some of his family in a memorial event that - at least for Howe - was a
much more appropriate commemoration than T’s physical funeral. In this case, T’s family
appear to have responded well to this unexpected overture from the internet.
A second example of St Pixels bereavement shows a different kind of relationship
between online and offline worlds. S, unlike T, was open with his family about his online
churchgoing. S was an elderly man, unable to attend a local church, and he and his wife both
relied on radio and later on internet ministry to participate in Christian worship. When S
entered his final illness, his family took the initiative and contacted St Pixels with regular
updates, which became the focus for community prayers at St Pixels over several weeks.
When S died, St Pixels began a memorial thread that eventually amassed more than
200 responses. Almost all of these messages were addressed to S in person, sharing
memories, praising his character or looking forward to a future reunion. Other messages
expressed support for S’s family. S’s family joined the community in person to respond to
these messages and attended the online funeral.
My third example is rather different. When C joined St Pixels, she explained to the
community that she suffered from autism and had been cruelly treated by insensitive
churches in the past. Community members befriended her, sympathised, supported her
through times of crisis, and offered help with difficult tasks by telephone. The community
was devastated when C revealed that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and began to offer
prayer and emotional support as her condition worsened. Some of C’s friends and family now
joined St Pixels, offering their own perspectives on her health struggles. But unlike T and S,
C had a secret: she was inventing her entire story, and had done so before. Community
leaders recognised curious similarities between tales of cancer sufferers on different Christian
websites, tried to corroborate some of the details she mentioned, and eventually concluded
that C was a hoax - and that her “friends and family” were all hoaxes, too. The St Pixels
community was, unsurprisingly, devastated. Their trust had been betrayed, and in an online
community where communication relies entirely on words, trust is the only thing that allows
participants to invest their emotions in meaningful relationships.
Even when the details of a death are authentic, bereavement can lead to emotional
chaos. One of the best-known events in the history of the online game World of Warcraft was
a funeral, a disastrous collision of expectations that sparked a discussion that is still
ongoing.28 When the Warcraft player Fayejin died in 2006, her in-world friends announced a
simple memorial event, to be held at her favourite place in the game.29 Their announcement
was spotted by members of a rival guild, who staged an ambush at the funeral, videoed the
massacre and edited their recording to a soundtrack.30 Immediately after the event, angry
mourners turned to Fayejin’s memorial thread to express their fury, and the most striking of
these comments were quickly added to the ambush video as trophies demonstrating the
visceral response the perpetrators had provoked. The most-viewed upload of the Fayejin
funeral video has now amassed 5.5 million views and 45,000 comments, and – most
surprisingly – new comments are still added every day to debate the merits of the funeral and
the raid.
These bereavement stories are worth noting on two levels. First, death features here as
a moment at which community values and concerns are expressed with particular clarity.

28
Tyler Nagata, “The WoW Funeral Raid – Four Years Later,” GamesRadar, March 5, 2010,
http://www.gamesradar.com/the-wow-funeral-raid-four-years-later/.
29
Yanoa, “Memorial to Fayejin,” Illidrama Forum Thread, March 3, 2006,
http://forums.illidrama.com/showthread.php?1826-Memorial-to-Fayejin.
30
“Serenity Now,” Serenity Now Bombs a World of Warcraft Funeral, n.d.,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJVolaC8pw.
Each of these stories has been told and retold by the communities involved, functioning as a
“paradigmatic scene” demonstrating particular articulations of values and concerns. In these
tales, deep emotional bonds are revealed, community members act with creativity and
imagination, and online community promises to overcome offline disconnection. Tensions
over appropriate forms of authenticity, deception and play are highlighted and discussed
through narrative.
Second, these tales also show some of the ways in which an online community can
adapt its portfolio of communication options to respond to death in a way that refers back to
familiar offline traditions. St Pixels published a kind of obituary for T and for S, created
forum threads that functioned like books of remembrance, and organised funeral services
with key roles for the family. All of these layers focused closely on one of the core values of
St Pixels – community – encouraging participants to share their memories of T and S as
active community participants and keeping memorial activity within the community.
Fayejin’s funeral was more unusual: a memorial thread did develop on the Warcraft forum,
but her friends also organised a kind of procession in-world. We can see these game events as
contemporary rituals, developed by groups with no connection to organised religion, but at
least some elements have offline parallels.

Death and Social Media

Social networking sites like Facebook generate a rather different kind of community,
based primarily – not exclusively – on connections formed offline. Just like the communities
of St Pixels and World of Warcraft, Facebook networks have proven reluctant to let their
friends disappear on death without some kind of memorial within their shared digital space.
Users build up networks of contacts, assemble collections of their favourite images, videos
and music and publish regular updates about their thoughts and activities. When a user dies,
this collage of tastes and experiences remains online, available for friends and family to
continue to interact with - a ready-made memorial webpage. The styles of mourning that have
been observed on social network sites combine elements of all the digital media themes we
have examined so far, but some researchers have also detected indications here of some
distinctive areas of social transformation.
In Elizabeth Drescher’s account of the death of Kirstin Paisley, Facebook acts as a
space for multiple forms of bereavement communication. Kirstin keeps her audience updated
on her condition, then passes responsibility for the task to a friend. Her audience posts
prayers, messages of support and comments on her progress to her wall, generating a
community that continues to interact through Kirstin’s Facebook page years after she died.
Drescher suggests that Facebook’s role shifts over time, moving from one genre of
bereavement talk to another, operating as a social network, then a vigil site, then a space for
grief akin to a roadside memorial, and finally becoming an enduring online memorial.31
Drescher refers to this online presence as Kirstin’s ‘eternal digital body’,32 but we
should not overstate the novelty of this phenomenon. The digital creations that survive us are
the latest additions to the physical collections of clothing, hand-written notes and other
belongings that make up our more traditional legacies – raising new problems, incidentally,
for inheritance lawyers. It is common for memories of the dead to be triggered by unexpected
encounters with familiar objects, smells, music, activities and places. Now we are also
haunted by old emails, wall posts, and phone numbers that remain in our digital address
books.
One aspect of our digital legacies is worth noting. Unlike physical possessions, digital

31
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 215.
32
Ibid., 216.
systems can be triggered by automated processes, confronting us with memories in a manner
that some can find highly disconcerting. Facebook changed its policy toward the dead in
2009,33 when bereaved users began complaining that they had received messages inviting
them to get back in touch with their dead friends. Not everyone objected: for some, this kind
of serendipity is a much-valued reminder of a friendship, and possibly even a sign that the
deceased is trying to communicate. ‘I love that you are so often at the top of my friends list’,
wrote one student observed by Drescher. ‘I smile every time. I know that you are keeping
tabs on me.’34
Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, explores the eeriness of digital communication in
her new book of short stories.35 In ‘Would you like to reconnect?’, a mother keeps in touch
with her son through Twitter, hears the news of his death by tweet, refuses to unsubscribe
from the automated emails she still receives from his account – and then replies to one of
those emails, and receives a cryptic message in response. Elements of the story recall the
Victorian ghost tales of MR James, who was also fascinated by themes of obsession,
seclusion, memory and haunted technology.
Many forms of digital mourning raise issues around ownership and enfranchisement,
and Facebook and MySpace are no different. The openness of online media to public editing
can challenge the right of traditional memorial gatekeepers to own and manage the memory
of the deceased. When an individual dies, their funeral service and physical gravesite are
likely to be designed and controlled by their close family, but their Facebook or MySpace
profiles are open to any friend or contact who wishes to share memories and express their
emotions. This possibility may be particularly valued by children and teenagers mourning
their schoolfriends. Children and teens might be expected to be less familiar with traditional
funeral routines, disconnected from the funeral organisation process, potentially motivated to
dispute the narratives of the deceased’s life memorialised by parents, and very comfortable
with social media as a communication environment.
Surveying 200 MySpace profiles of dead users, Brian Carroll and Katie Landry
identified five categories of messages, all seeking to construct a narrative of the life of the
dead that unites all mourners into a bereaved community while according a prominent role to
their authors. Most frequently, messages acted as visible public symbols of grief. Others
expressed admiration for the dead, petitioned the dead for help, or retold a narrative featuring
the author in a key role, and the final category includes messages that used MySpace as ‘a
surface on which to write of the values, beliefs and meaning of the deceased.’36
Of course, the memorial page itself is only the most concentrated point in a much
wider network of expressions of bereavement. A complete analysis of responses would need
to attend also to the profiles of friends and family, who may change their own profile photos
and status updates to express their grief and reaffirm their connection to the deceased. Carroll
and Landry attempted to collect data regarding these practices through a survey of students,
but direct access to all of these expressions would be extremely difficult to achieve. We can
observe, at least, that social network sites include multiple surfaces for constructing and
contesting memories of the deceased, owned by different individuals and visible to different
audiences.
Carroll and Landry’s third category - petition - is particularly interesting for scholars

33
Max Kelly, “Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook,” The Facebook Blog, October 26,
2009, https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=163091042130.
34
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 216.
35
Joanne Harris, “Would You Like To Reconnect?,” in A Cat, A Hat, and a Piece of String (London:
Doubleday, 2012), 60–69.
36
Brian Carroll and Katie Landry, “Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to
Grieve and to Mourn,” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society (2010): 345.
of religion. Similar phenomena have been observed across many online media during times
of bereavement. In my own study of St Pixels, I found that the majority of postings to the
memorial threads created for S and T were messages written for the dead to read. On
memorial sites, according to Kylie Veale, ‘the living speak to the dead as if they were still
alive’, turning each memorial into ‘a “living” social presence for the deceased’. 37 Elizabeth
Drescher reports that Kirstin’s friends used Facebook as a direct connection to her after her
death was announced, ‘continuing to speak directly to Kirstin as she moved — their prayers
expressing a shared theology — from this life to the next.’38
Jed Brubaker and Gillian Hayes have surveyed more than 1300 MySpace profiles,
looking to chart the trajectory of comments over time.39 Almost every message was addressed
to the dead profile owner, and in some cases individuals who did not follow this convention
were reprimanded by others. Frequency of postings peaked over the first 10 days after the
death, primarily expressing shock; after this period, comments shifted to include more details
of everyday life. Further spikes in posting occurred in subsequent years on the dead user’s
birthday, the anniversary of their death and at major public holidays.
For Brubaker and Hayes, the practice of addressing comments to the dead
demonstrates the importance of social network sites as ‘a platform through which the
deceased continue to play a role in the practices of the living’.40 There is a form of
‘technospirituality’ at work here, Brubaker has argued in collaboration with Janet Vertesi.
‘Just because users are dead does not mean they are not watching… present in the center of
the action, continuously and spiritually involved in the lives of their friends.’41 Brubaker and
Vertesi discern a consistent view of the afterlife in MySpace comments, ‘a symmetry wherein
the dead are assumed to still be active “in heaven” and continuing to amass experiences’.
Friends post regular updates about their everyday lives, in some cases asking the dead
questions about their afterlife. One comment reveals a multi-layered relationship with the
dead, involving physical cemetery visits and mobile phones as well as MySpace: “How was
your Christmas? Mine was ok … got clothes and stuff what about you?? I’m going to see you
tomorrow! Did u get my text message?”42

Analysis: What’s New About Digital Bereavement?

As digital media become integrated into the activities and networks of everyday life,
we should expect to see bereavement becoming increasingly mediated through digital
technologies. This chapter has surveyed some of the major areas in which this shift is taking
place. Digital media can help the dying and the bereaved to locate information, express grief
and maintain connections, including connections to the dead. In this final section, we return
to our initial discussion of emotion and technological change. Do these new developments
actually reflect any important shift in how bereavement is experienced and performed? More
specifically, do these digital forms of bereavement reflect any shift in how emotions of grief
are felt and expressed?

37
Kylie Veale, “Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for
Remembering the Dead,” Fibreculture 3 (2004), FCJ-014.
38
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 215.
39
Jed Brubaker and Gillian Hayes, “‘“We Will Never Forget You [online]”: An Empirical
Investigation of Post-mortem MySpace Comments’, in Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Computer-
Supported Cooperative Work (Guangzhou: ACM, 2011): 123–132.
40
Ibid., 129.
41
Jed Brubaker and Janet Vertesi, “Death and the Social Network”
(dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers. p3 presented at the Computer-Human Interaction 2010, Atlanta,
2010).
42
Ibid., 3.
Death in Everyday Life
A number of scholars have suggested that digital mourning breaks with the social and
emotional norms of recent Western society. According to Carroll and Landry, the late 19th
and early 20th century saw a shift toward carefully-planned memorial events in which
emotional display must be minimised, and then more recently toward informal vernacular
memorials.43 Drescher emphasises ‘the silence and social isolation of the sick and dying’ in
hospitals away from the flow of everyday life.44 All three authors see online memorials as the
harbingers of a major shift beyond these trends toward a more connected, emotionally
expressive, self-directed way of dying and grieving. For Carroll and Landry, digital media
represent a ‘model of grieving’ that is ‘closer to many non-Western models’, in which ‘the
deceased are remembered and included in the daily activities of the ongoing lives of their
survivors.’45 For Drescher, ‘new media have made illness, dying, and death significantly more
visible to those affected directly and indirectly as well as to the public more generally. The
regular narration of illness, dying, death, and bereavement in social media sites has removed,
at least at a very basic physical and psychological level, much of the mystery surrounding the
end of life.’46
This integration of life and death is only one of the new styles of mourning identified
by scholars of digital media. As noted above, school friends, online communities, fans of
celebrities and complete strangers who feel connected through a similar bereavement
experience can all plan, contribute to and engage with their own digital memorials,
potentially contesting the right of the family to determine how the deceased is remembered.
Categories of grief that are not understood or respected by local support networks can be
expressed digitally. At Rainbows Bridge, for example, online memorials can be created for
pets, connecting bereaved owners and allowing them to express emotions of loss and hopes
for future reunion that might not be sanctioned elsewhere.47 Individuals mourning specific
kinds of loss - infant death, death by suicide, loss of a parent - may find online grief
communities much more attuned to their emotions and needs than offline friends and
family.48
Carroll and Landry also argue that the expected narrative of mourning has changed
over time, and suggest that digital media can help mourners to craft their own alternative
trajectories.49 The ritualized styles and periods of mourning dress and behaviour prevalent in
the Victorian period have been replaced by expectations of a rapid return to “normal” life, but
online memorials and grief communities can help the bereaved to resist social pressure,
acknowledge a different emotional response, and find a more personal way to relate to their
dead. For some commentators, this freedom from social pressure may actually be dangerous,
encouraging an unhealthy intensity or duration of grief.50
This approach emphasises transformations in forms of grieving, and is partly upheld
by Tony Walter and his co-authors in their recent review of digital death literature. On social

43
Carroll and Landry, “Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to
Mourn,” 343.
44
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 209.
45
Carroll and Landry, “Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to
Mourn,” 343.
46
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 209.
47
Rainbows Bridge, www.rainbowsbridge.com/hello.htm
48
Ruth Swartwood, “Surviving Grief: An Analysis of the Exchange of Hope in Online Grief
Communities,” Omega 63, no. 2 (n.d.): 161–181.
49
Carroll and Landry, “Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to
Mourn,” 342.
50
Jed Brubaker et al., “Grief-stricken in a Crowd: The Language of Bereavement and Distress in Social
Media” (presented at the ICWSM-12, Dublin, 2012), http://sm.rutgers.edu/pubs/brubaker-grief-icwsm2012.pdf.
network sites like Facebook, Walter agrees, ‘pictures of the dead, conversations with the
dead, and mourners’ feelings can and do become part of the everyday online world’. ‘Grief
has become more public’51; ‘the innovation of interactive social media is that grief is re-
emerging as a communal activity, within existing social networks’, just as in pre-modern
societies.52
Facebook is not the whole story, however, and the support promised by online grief
communities may have quite the opposite effect. Online support groups could actually
intensify the sequestration of socially-problematic grief experiences, gathering the bereaved
in private online spaces away from public view.53 Even where grief is made public, we should
not assume that increased attention leads in every case to emotional empowerment. Some of
the bereaved may not welcome the appearance of unsanctioned online memorials telling
alternative narratives. Online communities have their own norms of acceptable and
unacceptable behaviour and their own emotional regimes, and attempts to breach those norms
may be strictly policed. On Facebook and MySpace, posts and updates expressing the wrong
kind of emotion can lead to public reprimand from unsympathetic online contacts.54 Digital
media have even been used by individuals and groups to conduct campaigns of harassment
against the grieving.55 In one particularly unpleasant case in 2011, a British man was
imprisoned for four months after targeting four recently-deceased teenagers with mocking
YouTube videos and posting a series of offensive messages and defaced photographs to their
Facebook memorials.56

Death and the Digital Afterlife

Another key theme of scholarship in this field has been the discovery that digital
media can be used in attempts to communicate with the dead. As noted above, all kinds of
online memorials – in online communities, at online cemeteries and on social networking
sites – attract a high volume of messages addressed to the deceased. These postmortem
communications appear to propose a distinctive vision of the afterlife, in which the dead exist
in a parallel realm of birthday parties, Christmas holidays and internet access, able to watch
the living, to receive their messages and to intervene with messages or helpful acts of their
own.
Some scholars have asked if the use of digital media to send messages to the dead
might reveal a shift in popular thinking. According to Drescher, ‘new digital media, as they
have begun to restructure day-to-day communication practices and, in turn, social relatedness,
reform our understanding of modernity’s dichotomized relationships between illness and
wellness, living and dying, the living and the dead, and the now and the hereafter.’57 This
argument leads Drescher to pose a far-reaching question: ‘If… digital social media are
inviting a dissolution of metaphorical and experiential boundaries between these states, what
is the attendant effect … on concepts such as “eternity” and “salvation” that are subject to
radical restructuring in postmodern, digitally integrated culture?’ This puzzle remains
unanswered at the end of her article, but a list of quotations she includes from Kirstin’s

51
Tony Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? An Overview,” Omega 64,
no. 4 (2011): 288.
52
Ibid., 290.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
Whitney Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief
Online,” First Monday 16, no. 12 (2011),
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.
56
Steven Morris, “Internet Troll Jailed After Mocking Deaths of Teenagers,” Guardian.co.uk,
September 13, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-mocking-teenagers.
57
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 206.
Facebook wall do at least show that some of Kirstin’s friends are still treating her as an active
agent in their lives after her death. ‘I know you are keeping tabs on me’, writes one. ‘Thank
you for helping me find the right words to say to my grandmother’, writes another, ‘who is so
very scared to die… Even after passing into the next, you and your life still helps minister to
those in need.’58
Drescher is writing for a Christian journal about a death in a Christian community,
and emphasises the continuity of the writing practices of the bereaved with Christian
theology, but these comments seem to show exactly the same kind of thinking about the
afterlife that other scholars have discovered among online communities with no connection to
organised religion. Walter takes Drescher’s question further, speculating that these shared
themes of post-mortem communication might be emerging from an overlap between the form
of digital media and the content of popular, post-Christian spirituality:
The Copernican revolution may have eroded the plausibility of heaven being up there in the sky, but the
digital revolution enables a plausible geography of the dead residing in cyberspace. Posting a Facebook
message to the dead and posting a Facebook message to cyberspace feel just the same… Significantly,
online references to the dead as angels or in the company of angels are frequent… This is not absurd.
Angels are messengers, traveling from heaven to earth and back, and cyberspace is an unseen medium for
the transfer of messages through unseen realms, so there may well be a resonance between how some
people imagine online messaging and how they imagine angels.59

Unlike Drescher, Walter’s argument does not actually postulate a change in attitudes.
Rather, he suggests that the sensation of writing online complements certain themes of the
contemporary spiritual imagination, leading some writers to articulate those themes more
openly. The internet is not creating a new imaginary, but it is encouraging more public
expression of certain ideas about the afterlife.
Brubaker and Hayes make a similar argument, focusing not on the feeling or
mythology of writing in cyberspace but on the established conventions of social media.
Direct address is simply the standard mode of social networking. When writing on a person’s
Facebook wall, one writes to that person - even when that person is dead. In some cases, this
might reflect a genuine belief that the deceased is reading the message, but for others this
style of writing is simply an established idiom. Even an idiom, however, can affect our
perceptions: ‘The way in which post-mortem comments adhere to existing patterns in social
network sites demonstrates the importance of technology in… shaping post-mortem practices
and, in turn, our experience of death.’60
Two points should be made here. First, writing to the dead is not new, and nor is the
idea that the dead watch and speak to the living. The bereaved have long written comments in
books of remembrance, attached notes to flowers and tied them to roadside memorials, or
tried to express their emotions in journals. Douglas Davies reports that almost two thirds of
British women and more than one third of men believe they have experienced the presence of
a dead relative.61 Philip Esler, a prominent New Testament scholar, included a detailed
account of his own family’s communications with a dead child in his influential study of New
Testament theology, arguing – with support from Karl Rahner – that such views were
commonplace among Christians until at least the mid-20th century.62 What seems to be

58
Ibid., 216.
59
Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? An Overview,” 293.
60
Brubaker and Hayes, “‘“We Will Never Forget You [online]”: An Empirical Investigation of Post-
mortem MySpace Comments’, in Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work,” 132.
61
Davies, Emotion, identity, and religion, 138.
62
Philip Francis Esler, New Testament Theology : Communion and Community (London: SPCK, 2005),
p229ff.
happening when digital mourners speak to their dead – as so often online – seems to be a shift
to make public something that until recently was widespread but private.
Second, we should not try too hard to distinguish those who “really believe” from
those who do not. For some, writing to the dead may be intended as a literal act of
communication, as Drescher and Walter suggest. For others, it may be a cathartic act or a
literary convention. For many, the distinction between these two attitudes is likely to be
unclear, blurred and shifting over time, as the fresh bonds of relationships with the dying are
transformed into something else, condensed into certain memories, objects and occasional
practices that tie the living to their dead within the routines of everyday life. Belief rarely
forms a clear, stable, easily-explained structure. Drescher expresses the ambiguity of belief
rather well in this account of the birthday reminder email, set up by her now-dead mother,
that she still receives each year:
this automated guilt-inducer now has an eerie beyond-the-grave quality that […] prevents me from
blocking “anna1121” from my account out of a sentimentality that I cannot quite sort out. I know the email
is not really from my mother, and yet I can fully imagine her pecking away at a mystical keyboard in
whatever sweet by-and-by she now inhabits.63

Conclusion
This chapter began by considering two approaches to media and cultural change:
Heidi Campbell’s emphasis on the agency of communities in the social shaping of
technology, and Altheide, Snow and Hjarvard’s argument that any mediated communication
must be subjected to an institutional, technological and aesthetic “media logic” that can lead
to major social transformation.
The example of death and bereavement demonstrates that these different perspectives
both have merit, offering complementary approaches to a complex problem. When a group of
Warcraft players designs a funeral procession within the game, they are taking a technology
designed for certain functions and creating something quite unexpected. When their rivals
attack their funeral and slaughter the mourners, we see the limitations of their plan: Warcraft
allows players to kill one another, and fosters a culture within which subgroups can take
pleasure in killing, embedded in an ecosystem of forums, blogs and video sharing sites
through which accounts of startling achievements can be quickly circulated and discussed.
Funerals at St Pixels take place in a chatroom custom-built for online Christian worship, a
fine example of the religious-social shaping of technology, but this space has its own media
logic too: only certain group members have the skills to write code, only some have the
authority to decide what kinds of events are hosted, and the group’s social norms and rules
strongly favour collaborative rather than hostile interaction. St Pixels has now relocated its
activity to Facebook, introducing another important dimension of media logic: Facebook is
ultimately in control, and St Pixels will have to adapt to any changes in rules or design that
the site may undergo in future.
The bereaved and the organisations that support them are turning to the internet to
explore a multitude of new ways to share and manage grief. Some, like digitally-altered
deathbed photography in hospitals and live webcasts of funerals, are closely integrated into
existing networks of families and friends. Others, like the memorial practices emerging in
online communities, address audiences who share common interests but might never meet
offline at all. Online memorial pages and grief communities can bring complete strangers
together around a common experience of loss. In all of these spaces, technology and
discourses about technology are being shaped to meet the needs of the bereaved, while
exerting their own influences over the ways in which emotions are shared. Research into the
relationship between death and digital media remains in its infancy, and serious scholarship

63
Drescher, “Pixels Perpetual Shine,” 205.
from a religious studies perspective is almost non-existent, but there is certainly much here
that would reward further study.

Work Cited:
Altheide, David L, and Robert P Snow. Media logic. London: Sage, 1979.
Brubaker, Jed, and Gillian Hayes. “‘“We Will Never Forget You [online]”: An Empirical
Investigation of Post-mortem MySpace Comments’, in Proceedings of the 14th Conference
on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work”. Guangzhou: ACM, 2011: 123–132.
Brubaker, Jed, Funda Kivran-Swaine, Lee Taber, and Gillian Hayes. “Grief-stricken in a
Crowd: The Language of Bereavement and Distress in Social Media” presented at the
ICWSM-12, Dublin, 2012. http://sm.rutgers.edu/pubs/brubaker-grief-icwsm2012.pdf.
Brubaker, Jed, and Janet Vertesi. “Death and the Social Network”.
Dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers. p3 presented at the Computer-Human Interaction
2010, Atlanta, 2010.
Campbell, Heidi. When Religion Meets New Media. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
Carroll, Brian, and Katie Landry. “Logging on and Letting Out: Using Online Social
Networks to Grieve and to Mourn.” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society (2010): 30,
341–350.
Davies, Douglas James. Emotion, Identity, and Religion : Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Drescher, Elizabeth. “Pixels Perpetual Shine: The Mediation of Illness, Dying, and Death in
the Digital Age.” CrossCurrents 62, no. 2 (2012): 204–218.
Egglestone, Stefan Rennick. “Online Memorials: a Personal Experience” presented at the
Computer-Human Interaction, Atlanta, 2010. Available online from
dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers.
Esler, Philip Francis. New Testament Theology : Communion and Community. London:
SPCK, 2005.
Gilbert, Kathleen, and Michael Massimi. “From Digital Divide to Digital Immortality:
Thanatechnology at the Turn of the 21st Century.” In Dying, Death, and Grief in An Online
Universe : For Counselors and Educators, edited by Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe Cupit, and
Kathleen R Gilbert, 16–30. New York: Springer, 2012.
Golden, Tom. “Healing and the Internet.” The Forum 32, no. 4 (2006): 8.
Harris, Joanne. “Would You Like To Reconnect?” In A Cat, A Hat, and a Piece of String,
60–69. London: Doubleday, 2012.
Hjarvard, Stig. “The Mediatisation of Religion: Theorising Religion, Media and Social
Change.” Culture & Religion 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–135.
Howe, Mark. Online Church? : First Steps Towards Virtual Incarnation. Cambridge: Grove
Books, 2007.
Hutchings, Tim. “Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet’.” In
Emotion, Identity, and Death : Mortality Across Disciplines, edited by Douglas James Davies
and Chang-Won Park. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012.
KABC-TV. “Whitney Houston’s Friends, Family Say Goodbye”, February 18, 2012.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/entertainment&id=8549082.
Kelly, Max. “Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook.” The Facebook Blog,
October 26, 2009. https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=163091042130.
Lochhead, David. Shifting Realities : Information Technology and the Church. Geneva: WCC
Publications, 1997.
Moore, Jane. “Being There: Technology at the end of Life’.” In Dying, Death, and Grief in
An Online Universe : For Counselors and Educators, edited by Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe
Cupit, and Kathleen R Gilbert, 78–86. New York: Springer Pub., 2012.
Morris, Steven. “Internet Troll Jailed After Mocking Deaths of Teenagers.” Guardian.co.uk,
September 13, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-
mocking-teenagers.
Nagata, Tyler. “The WoW Funeral Raid – Four Years Later.” GamesRadar, March 5, 2010.
http://www.gamesradar.com/the-wow-funeral-raid-four-years-later/.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to
Grief Online.” First Monday 16, no. 12 (2011).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.
Rawlinson, Linnie, and Nick Hunt. “Jackson Dies, Almost Takes Internet with Him.”
CNNTech, June 26, 2009. http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-26/tech/michael.jackson.internet.
Roberts, Pamela. “From My Space to Our Space: The Functions of Web Memorials in
Bereavement.” The Forum 32, no. 4 (2006): 1-4.
Ruechers, Angela. “Eternal Recall: Memorial Photos in the Digital Environment” presented
at the Computer-Human Interaction, Atlanta, 2010. dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/#papers.
p1.
Sanderson, Jimmy, and Pauline Hope Cheong. “Tweeting Prayers and Communicating Grief
Over Michael Jackson Online.” Bulletin of Science Technology and Society (2010): 30, 328–
340.
“Serenity Now.” Serenity Now Bombs a World of Warcraft Funeral, n.d.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJVolaC8pw.
Swartwood, Ruth. “Surviving Grief: An Analysis of the Exchange of Hope in Online Grief
Communities.” Omega 63, no. 2 (n.d.): 161–181.
Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for
Remembering the Dead.” Fibreculture 3 (2004): FCJ-014.
de Vries, Brian, and Susan Moldaw. “Virtual Memorials and Cyber Funerals: Contemporary
Expressions of Ageless Experiences.” In Dying, Death, and Grief in An Online Universe :
For Counselors and Educators, edited by Carla Sofka, Illene Noppe Cupit, and Kathleen R
Gilbert, 135–150. New York: Springer, 2012.
Walter, Tony, Rachid Hourizi, Wendy Moncur, and Stacey Pitsillides. “Does the Internet
Change How We Die and Mourn? An Overview.” Omega 64, no. 4 (2011): 275–302.
Yanoa. “Memorial to Fayejin.” Illidrama Forum Thread, March 3, 2006.
http://forums.illidrama.com/showthread.php?1826-Memorial-to-Fayejin.