{"id":802,"date":"2019-03-14T00:18:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T04:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=802"},"modified":"2019-03-14T00:18:32","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T04:18:32","slug":"new-avenues-for-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/03\/14\/new-avenues-for-grief\/","title":{"rendered":"New Avenues for Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

Death, especially of a loved one or a public figure, has always been difficult for people to deal with, and always will be.\u00a0 <\/span>Living in this world and surviving to old age means a person will see their grandparents, their parents, beloved pets, idols and role models all die, and such losses usually require a grieving process.\u00a0 <\/span>Everybody copes from their own traumas in their own ways, but technology has opened a door to a vastly more public sphere of mourning than almost ever before.<\/span><\/p>\n

The death of loved ones, while traditionally a private affair that would be told to those who were close enough to the individual to need or deserve to know, is now often shared like a family newsletter.\u00a0 <\/span>On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, there are countless posts mourning the loss of loved ones.\u00a0 <\/span>Would you want such a public display of the event of your death? Shared to thousands of people, many of which you probably don\u2019t know?\u00a0 <\/span>That isn\u2019t a very appealing thought to me, but there are some benefits of this novel and nuanced grief platform.\u00a0 <\/span>There is a sense in which Facebook and other social media sites make your mourning, your call for support, more immediate than even an email or a letter.\u00a0 <\/span>In sharing with everyone at once, we intentionally, if subconsciously, abuse people\u2019s Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).\u00a0 <\/span>This usually leads to a greater influx of messages of condolences, which have some comfort to add that is, importantly, very easy to give.<\/span><\/p>\n

But as we know, the internet is also filled with people who dedicate themselves to antagonizing other people, even over such sensitive topics.\u00a0 <\/span>We all know what trolls are, but where do they come from?\u00a0 <\/span>Why is grief trolling worth anybody\u2019s time?\u00a0 <\/span>Phillips mentions a troll she met in her research who says that a \u201cstandard response to criticism of trolling is an emphatic HEY GUYS THE POWER BUTTON IS RIGHT THERE.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Yes, a solution to avoid trolls is not entering the public spaces where they have some rights to say what they want.\u00a0 <\/span>But grief and mourning pages on Facebook and other relatively, for lack of a better phrase, family-friendly platforms seem like the wrong hill to take your stand for free speech on.\u00a0 <\/span>Do these trolls and their motivations say something about our society?\u00a0 <\/span>Are we just becoming less empathetic?\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t think we know enough yet about the situation to say, but there is clearly a big shift happening in the way we experience loss as a culture, especially the way we express our feelings and share our condolences.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Death, especially of a loved one or a public figure, has always been difficult for people to deal with, and always will be.\u00a0 Living in this world and surviving to old age means a person will see their grandparents, their parents, beloved pets, idols and role models all die, and such losses usually require a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-e"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-cW","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}