Online Life after Offline Death

The Internet has had various effects on modern life but it has also changed the way its three billion users confront the end of life. With so many people posting and sharing stories online the net becomes a kind of archive or global diary which is used by families, friends and even journalists to make sense and come to terms with death through the stories that are posted on both public and private web pages. This is done through either specific memorial sites such as forevermissed.com or through the major social media networks like Facebook.   In this blogpost we will show how the social media site Facebook is bringing death and grieving to a wider public and what ethical issues this might raise.

As of September 2015 the social network Facebook has over one billion active users (Facebook  2015). Every year it loses a portion of these users to death.  A number of things can happen to a Facebook page after a user dies. The three main options are: an account is permanently deleted, the content is downloaded and sent to a family member and then deleted or an account is memorialised. All of the content of a memorialised account remains online and visible to all people they shared it with in life. However, the content of a memorialised account cannot be deleted or changed. (Facebook 2015)

In Folker Hanusch’s article Representing Death in the Digital Age it is stated that as many as 91% of people who used the Internet as a part of the process of loss has found that it has helped them with their grief (Hanusch 2010: 158). This function of the internet becomes clear when we look at the example discussed above. Memorialised accounts serve as what Hanusch describes as an online shrine, or an interactive version of the written orbituary.The availability of a dead person’s Facebook profile allows the family and friends of a person to still hold on to bits of them instead of losing them completely. It provides a place to go and connect to someone without going to a place that is obviously connected to their death, like a graveyard or memorial website.

 A memorialized facebook page can also be more public than traditional grieving spaces. Facebook’s network connects not only close family members but people from all aspects of a person’s life from all over the world. A facebook profile might not be totally public, but Facebook’s memorialised pages allow for many more people to confront and deal with ideas of death, without prioritizing one group of people over another and without requiring grievers to be in a specific location.  Facebook acts as democratizing force, everyone who was virtually connected is given the chance to participate in the process of grief. This accessibility and openness was not possible earlier in the 20th century when the experience of death and grieving were localised and private. (Hanusch 2010: 158)

The huge amount of content each Internet user produces means that there are more items available to construct memories and work through grief.  This massive amount of content is comforting to those grieving because, as Susan Sontag states, “memory is the only relationship we have with the dead” (Trend 2006:122). Online Facebook pages allow for people to still feel like they have a tangible relationship to the deceased because they continue to be part of people's online lives even if they are no longer with them in the offline world. This increases the emotional importance of online memorialisation.

However, remembrance online is not without its problems and ethical dilemmas. Facebook gives people choices regarding whether or not they remain online after death, but remains quite strict on what they will or will not do with dead user’s profiles. 

A recent example of when Facebook's strict memorialization policies have come under fire is the plight of the Father of a murdered woman named Hollie Gazzard. Hollie was stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend in 2014. Her Facebook account was subsequently memorialised exactly as it was at the point of her death. This has resulted in photographs of Hollie and her murderer together and happy remaining visible on her memorialised profile. Hollie’s family has stated that the fact that the photos remain online have been causing them distress and turning the memorialised Facebook page from a place of refuge and grieving into a constant reminder of the violent nature of her death (BBC 2015). 

Photos posted by Hollie that were innocent and loving at the time of posting have had their meanings changed. The images of a happy couple are now inextricably linked to violence. Images once about love now serve to remind viewers that violent death is what ultimately resulted from the relationship. The person who died can have no way of knowing what images posted to Facebook would come to represent for friends and family after death and they are unable to change what they have posted. Does that mean that in dying they forfeit the right to tell their own stories? Family members can not change the events of the past but does that mean they should be given the option to alter a person’s memory of their past through their online presence? After all, if her Facebook page is truly an archive of Hollie’s life, the great tragedy of her life was that her ex-boyfriend was part of it, and erasing photos of them will not stop him from always being part of how she is remembered.

Facebook continues to state that they are unwilling to change their policies on these issues, though they acknowledged that in certain tragic circumstances their policy might leave painful reminders (BBC 2015). This raises several questions as to what is exactly the purpose of memorialized sites and who do they serve. The dead can not be asked permission for the use of their online content (Hanusch 2010 :155). Who then, does that right of use go to?  Does a person’s online memory belong to their families, to media corporations on on whom’s sites they shared content, or do they continue to belong to the users even after their death? Is it right that memorialised pages act as a repository for all memories, not only the good but the bad as well? 

Tweet- Should the living have the power to alter people’s  online profiles after death, what are the consequences for memory if they are allowed to do so?

BB, FM, LB, MM, YB

Sources 

BBC. "Facebook photos of Hollie Gazzard with her killer "causing distress "." bbc.com. October 26, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-34618228 (accessed November 5, 2015).

Buck, Stephanie. "How 1 Billion People Are Coping With Death and Facebook." Mashable.com. February 13, 2013. http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/facebook-after-death/#tfqra95tdiqr (accessed November 5, 2015).

Facebook . "What will happen to my account if I pass away?" facebook.com. November 5, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143 (accessed Novmeber 5, 2015).

Hanusch, Folker. "Representing Death in the Online Age." In Representing Death in the News, by Folker Hanusch, 145-160. London : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Trend, David. "But We Can Understand It: Beyond Polemics in the Media Violence Debate." In The Myth of Media Violence: A Critical Introduction, by David Trend, 108-123. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.