ABSTRACT
This chapter considers death-writing of the moment on a Facebook memorial group created in memory of a young adult. The analysis clarifies the main participation modes to collective mourning online in which friends of the deceased take up positions of co-tellers. Drawing on existing formats of digital interaction, namely ritual and knowing participation (Georgakopoulou, 2016), participants engage in mirroring acts of generic remembrance (ritual participation) or in one-off acts of personal remembrance, termed memorial outbursts (knowing participation). Memorial outbursts are shared as small stories of different types: breaking news stories of mourning: acts of remembrance in the here and now or the recent past; projections: stories about the sharer’s plans in the (near) future inviting the dead’s support or participation; and habitual stories of grief: small acts of remembrance in the everyday. The closer analysis of small stories of everyday mourning further points to their association with networked mourners’ changing identity and affective positioning over time in practices of forming continuing bonds with the dead. Mourning on Facebook is mobilized as a resource for vernacularizing, personalizing, at the same time as collectivizing the experience of grieving for the loss of a loved one, challenging ideas of bereavement as a ‘big’ event of rupture.
