‘It was the easiest way to kind of announce it’: Exploring death announcements on social media through a dramaturgical lens

Abstract

The internet and social media have radically transformed grief, mourning and memorialisation. This article addresses how online death announcements (ODAs) (where bereaved people use social media platforms to share news of a loved one’s death) are extending beyond the role of public death notification previously limited to newspaper-published obituaries. We argue that ODAs are social performances embodying a diverse range of grief responses and offer a significant new direction in death scholarship. We draw on semi-structured interview data with nine people who announced the death of a loved one on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Using Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework to interrogate this data, we argue that ODAs go beyond purely information-sharing devices and are, instead, complex performances which benefit mourners in a number of ways and are governed by tacit ‘rules’ of permission and content. To make sense of this, we analyse in turn the role of, and collaboration between, the ‘actors’ who post ODAs, the ‘performance’ of the ODA itself, and the ‘audience’ of friends/followers who ‘receive’ the ODA. We reveal that ODAs are social performances possessing multiple modalities and reveal the depth of complexity present in grieving online.