The growth of social network sites has resulted in an increasing number of profiles representing deceased users. Nowadays Over 6 million accounts on Facebook belong to dead people.
How people perceive death on social media are constantly evolving, particularly on Facebook — we don’t only have to grieve at a prescribed time and place. Grieving is evolving into something we can do anywhere, anytime.
The "Death on Facebook" project focused on improving the collective experience of losing someone in the digital realm.
Our fieldwork also showed the range of opinions on what should happen to a dead Facebook page, so it became really important to us to make our concept customisable. As each person’s Facebook page and news feed is the sum of their friendship network we didn't want to do anything that would affect the hard data of the dead person’s profile, only each individual's view of it.
Arnold van Gennep wrote in "the rites of passage" about the survivor of the dead being reintegrated back into the community at the same time as the deceased is travelling to the final spiritual destination. When we read this we knew we wanted to create some kind of final collective experience for the mourners and to mimic this journey from a solitary experience to collective experience.
We also looked at many types of therapy including art and movement therapy and found theories to support that tangibility was very important as a tool to achieve acceptance, the final stage of loss. We wanted to use this to transport the mourner from the digital to the solid world around them.
Created in collaboration with Kent Cam, Jón Helgi Hólmgeirsson and Isabel Valdés Marín.
