Mr Rogers, the American children’s TV host and noted cardigan wearer, once gave some advice for anyone caught in the midst of a tragic event: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” If he were alive today, he probably would have said “You will always find people who are tweeting.”
Every new tragedy is accompanied by a mass show of online solidarity. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January 2015, '#JeSuisCharlie' was tweeted over 5 million times - making it one of the most popular hashtags in Twitter’s history. Ten months later, millions of Facebook users draped a digital tricolore over their profile pictures when the city was attacked again - though not everybody was on board with the idea.
More and more, people are using their social media feeds to vent their grief. But it isn’t limited to huge, world-changing events - people often take to the Internet at the loss of a single person; even when they never met the person in question.
Legendary rock star David Bowie and beloved actor Alan Rickman died of cancer within days of each other earlier this year. A month later Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, died in her sleep. Each of their deaths was met by an outpouring of grief online, as fans from around the world took to social media to express their sorrow:
But of course, what with the internet being the internet, it’s inevitable that some kind of backlash usually occurs. Camilla Long, the film critic for The Times, risked the ire of many a Bowie acolyte when she posted a series of tweets questioning the sincerity of the mass mourning:
Then there’s The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, who last year wrote about his confusion over the popularity of a “mediocre” writer like the late Terry Pratchett:
“In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”
At first, Long and Jones’s comments seem like a principled stand against the growing use of hashtags and Facebook reactions to process the news of death; a feeling that those who grieve online are somehow violating a set of rules of etiquette that have yet to be written down. But Graham Jones, a psychologist specialising in the ways people use the Internet, sees this less as a reaction to the digitalisation of grief and more a typical response to other people’s grief.
“[Grief is] about a combination of things, not least of which how much you identify with somebody. If somebody in your family dies, you’re obviously in a much greater sense of grief than your neighbour.” Surprising as it may seem, this phenomenon can extend even to the rich and famous - it’s called a parasocial relationship, and it’s how fans of Bowie could weep over his death when he likely died having no idea they even existed. To his followers, Bowie was a member of the family. To Camilla Long, he was just a neighbour.
Disenfranchised grief
The ability to share our lives with millions around the world means parasocial relationships are more common than ever, but they’re far from a new phenomenon. In fact, Graham reckons that they’re pretty crucial to the way humans interact with each other.
“Whenever a big public figure dies, there’s an outpouring of public grief. It happens throughout human history, right the way back to the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It’s called disenfranchised grief, and acknowledging that shared grief keeps society functioning as a group.
“When Churchill died, people wrote long letters to newspapers. I was in London in 1997 when [Princess] Diana was killed, and you could smell the flowers at St James’ Park from a mile away. If that were to happen now there wouldn’t be as many flowers, but there would be millions and millions of tweets and shares. The only people who would lose out would be the florists.”
But what about those who argue that online grieving is nothing more than the latest symptom of a growing tide of ‘slacktivism’ - public platitudes designed for maximum exposure with a minimum of effort? If you really care about someone’s death, the argument goes, they’re worth much more than a like or a retweet.
Not so, in Graham’s opinion. “The fact that people are on their phone or on their computer means that they’re less connected to the situation, so they’re actually much more likely to do something. That’s why trolling takes place - those people wouldn’t be as rude if the person was in front of them.”
"Grief is a very individual thing"
There’s always been a pressure to conform to an expected public view, especially when it comes to dealing with big issues like death - sites like Facebook and Twitter are just the newest vehicles for that pressure. But the important thing to remember is that, whatever the medium you use, there’s no right or wrong way to grieve.
“Grief is a very individual thing,” says Graham. “We all go through the same stages [denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance], but the length of time we stay on one before passing to the next can vary tremendously.”
However you feel about using social media as a form of grieving, it’s a phenomenon that isn’t going away. Around 400 Facebook users die every hour, and their profiles aren’t automatically taken down when that happens. It’s estimated that if the site doesn't grow in popularity, the number of dead people on Facebook could outweigh the living by as early as 2065.
Maybe the florists who find themselves out of a job can start new careers making floral emoji arrangements.
