Mourning and memory in the twittersphere

Emerging work in the field of social media and mourning suggests that social media spaces have changed the landscape of grief by encouraging mourners to form communities online, post public statements about loss, and maintain continuing bonds with the deceased. While existing studies restrict their analyses to public or private online spaces, we examine a space that is suited to both private communication and information broadcast. In this paper, we analyse mentions of deceased Twitter users and find that Twitter facilitates multiple types of mourning behaviours previously identified in isolation within other online spaces. While some Twitter users engage directly with the deceased and display evidence of continuing bonds, others use Twitter to comment on the death of high profile individuals or individuals whose death sparked their interest – often connecting these deaths to broader topics, including current events and calls for social change. Overall, our findings suggest that Twitter is a unique online space that encourages users to engage in a variety of personal and public communication that ranges from highly personal and intimate interaction to abstracted and impersonal commenting.