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Abstract: This article explores how the Internet is reshaping relationships between the living and the dead. Drawing on data from the online memorial site ForeverMissed.com, it examines why online memorials are increasingly being used to commemorate the deceased instead of the more traditional genre of the obituary. It depicts how the Internet is providing new means for the bereaved to communicate with the dead and how these changes might signal new forms of consciousness and avenues of connectivity. Inspired by the findings of media theorist José van Dijck, I argue that online memorials serve both a commemorative and a 'communicative' function, allowing for relationships with the deceased to be maintained and for connections to be made with living others. This article also analyzes the Internet's role as a 'techno-spiritual system'.
Keywords: commemoration, communication, death, digital age, Internet, mortuary writing, online memorials, techno-spiritual system
Those who investigate death and bereavement [have] acknowledged that changes in elegiac modes are among the symptoms of sociocultural metamorphoses. (Gilbert 2006: xxi)
Over the last 10 years, scholars from a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in studying the ways people use the Internet to mourn and memorialize the dead. They have examined how online memorialization both reproduces and reconfigures traditional mortuary rituals (Gesesr 1998). One of the more striking changes, rarely explored in the literature, involves mortuary writing. Instead of just commemorating the deceased with descriptive accounts of their lives and achievements, it seems that the bereaved are also using online memorials to communicate with them. For instance, in a content analysis of 244 online memorial sites, gerontologists de Vries and Rutherford (2004: 5) found that online memorials "were more likely to be written to the deceased (e.g., in the form of a letter) rather than about or for the deceased (e.g., eulogy/ obituary or tribute)." Scholars working in the field of information and computer sciences have echoed this finding (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker et al. 2013; Roberts and Schall 2005). They have explored how social networking sites are appropriated for mourning and memorialization, noting that bereaved commentators "almost always address the deceased user as the primary audience" (Brubaker et al. 2013: 154).
Taking these observations as a point of departure, this article asks, why do online...