Sharing grief and mourning on Instagram: Digital patterns of family memories

摘要

Grief and mourning for deceased family members are an important part of family life. Whereas emotional expressions of sorrow had been reserved for friends and the closer family circle, this has changed dramatically since digital media enabled limitless sharing. Driven by the increasing mediatization of everyday life, more and more individuals have come to open up with private issues to the digital public. Often even intimate personal information of high emotionality like mourning is being disclosed. The sharing of grief online, not only establishes new ways of dealing with the death of a beloved person, but it also changes the way families remember and identify themselves. To show which new digital patterns in family memory have developed, Instagram hashtags were used to compile a large data set of photos and texts posted around the issue of family-related mourning in Germany. Altogether, 2,790 images and their corresponding texts were analyzed in order to find patterns for this kind of digital commemoration.