A Life Lived Online: How We Talk About Death on Social Media

By Alicia Eler / March 14, 2012 10:45 AM / 2 Comments

At http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_we_talk_about_death_on_social_media.php

Death is a part of life, both on and offline. Facebook and MySpace become gathering spaces for the living to mourn their fallen friends. What kind of language do people use to express their grief?

A new study out of the University of California at Irvine's School of Information and Computer Sciences takes a closer look at the language of bereavement and distress in social media. "Death in social media creates an entirely different kind of experience than we've ever really had before," says Jed Brubaker, a PhD Candidate at the University of California at Irvine. "Traditionally when someone dies, people come together at a certain place, certain time and grieve together - like a cemetery, wake." What types of language people use to mourn their loved one on social media, in front of other users?

Rather than take an obvious, trendy turn toward Facebook, the study looks at MySpace users, many of whom died young. Using a coding system, the researchers identifies emotionallt distressed content and an analysis of that language, which lays a foundation for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including automatic detection of bereavement-related distress. The researchers discovered that linguistic style can also indicate messages demonstrating distress in the space of post-mortem social media content.

After a user dies, friends visit the page and express their sadness, shock and grief. Later many return and continue updating and conversing with the user, often times sharing events and feelings as if the person were still alive. It's kind of like talking with a ghost.

By examining user-generated content, the researchers were able to observe the grieving process in a naturalistic, public setting. What's more is that this study focuses on "extreme expressions of grief and mourning in SNS following the death of a friend or loved one." This means more than just a few Twitter-esque RIPs, trending topics and the dead popping up in one's Facebook friend list. The researchers sought to expand the current knowledge base around the use of language in online grieving, rather than focus on the fact that people do express their grief on social media.

A previous study took a similar linguistic approach, looking at how those in mourning reacted to the deceased on memorialized Facebook profiles. Of the post-mortem Wall posts, they discovered higher rates of negative emotion than previously, when the user was alive. Visiting a deceased user's profile is seen as both a space for people to mourn and a space of pain. Some return to the profile again and again, continuing to post. Some decide to defriend the dead all... ( more at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_we_talk_about_death_on_social_media.php )