From private to public: the experience of mourning in digital society between digital obituary and digital gravestone

The digitization of society has redefined many dimensions of social reality, including such an individual experience as death. Even today, the end of life and the experience of mourning represent social issues that, on both the analog and digital planes, provoke broad debates and contrast spaces for reflection and the crossing of ethical and epistemological thresholds. While, however, in the physical world, there is the persistence of an invisibilization of death, in the digital world, death would seem to regain wide spaces of argumentation, narrative, and explicitness, shared and regulated by internalized social and moral norms. The article aims to analyze the social, emotional, and imaginary aspects of the end of life and the experience of mourning mediated by digital tools. In the context of digital ethnography, these aspects were explored through content analysis of living people’s interactions with the deceased’s profile on three social media (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp1). The aim was to identify a typology of users and the different narrative and elaborative modes of mourning by introducing the terms “Digital Gravestone” and “Digital Obituary”, not lacking, in the concluding part, references to ethical aspects on possible end-of-life scenarios and the experience of mourning.