| With the advent of the internet,our lives are extended online,creating a new narrative space for the before and after of death.Social media is a new kind of mourning space,where the originally private act of mourning is gradually made public.On the one hand,the living can "interact" with the deceased,creating a new "speaking into the air";on the other hand,the deceased acts as an invisible medium to connect with the living,amplifying the voice of the memorial community.Social media has reshaped people’s mourning rituals and discourses.In recent years,due to the emergence of epidemics,friends and relatives of the deceased who are at a distance are unable to reach the site,and are more likely to convey their condolences through social media.This also provides an opportunity for us to re-understand social media mourning.This paper takes Kobe’s death as the starting point for a large number of netizens to mourn on social media,and studies social media mourning behavior from the perspective of mourning rituals and ritual discourses.The first 2000 comments under Kobe’s top microblogs were selected for textual analysis to study netizens’ mourning discourse.The study shows that mourning ritual on social media plays a role in emotional connection,identity and constructing memories among mourners.It also raises concerns that social media mourning is both a convenience and a shackle,and that the seriousness and sincerity of mourning itself is dissipated by the convenience of arriving at it anytime and anywhere. |
