'R.I.P. man...u are missed and loved by many': entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest in Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the intextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Storying leaks for sharing: The case of leaking the “Moscovici draft” on Twitter

This article proposes a discourse-narrative approach to news making online as a networked practice of storying and sharing. This approach is illustrated in the examination of the release of a draft Eurogroup statement via journalist Paul Mason’s Facebook, Scribd and Twitter accounts on the 16th February 2015. The analysis draws on small story insights (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and the empirical framework of sharing (Androutsopoulos, 2014). It shows how the release of this leak event on Twitter is storied as a breaking news story unfolding moment-by-moment as it happens, at the same time as making up an incipient record of the event as it happened. It is argued that breaking news (micro)stories are shared as moments of narrative stancetaking, featuring a concise, portable storyline and cumulative evaluation(s) that foreground the relevance of the leak for the ongoing discussions on the Greek bailout negotiations as well as the continued importance of the journalist as the mediator of the leak. In this case of sharing a leaked document with networked participants, narrativity is drawn upon as a key resource for producing and circulating alternative stances on the Greek crisis, creating a range of networked participation positions. This article contributes to the study of news sharing online and digital storytelling based on the qualitative analysis of ‘small’ data

Digital Death and the Digital Afterlife: Oreet Ashery in Conversation with Korina Giaxoglou

Korina Giaxoglou: Let’s talk about digital death, an area we have both been interested in for some time now. To start with, what is digital death? Oreet Ashery: Digital death for me is how death, dying, and mourning are experienced through digital technologies, such as online social media or digital wills

Visual small stories of #jesuisaylan: sharing cosmopolitan emotions on Instagram

This article examines the circulation of Instagram posts using the hashtag #JeSuisAylan on the 3rd September 2015 as a reaction to the breaking news of three-year old Alan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean. Posts are analysed as visual small stories (Georgakopoulou 2016) and coded for types of story frames, which help to clarify users' participation patterns (De Fina 2016). Findings indicate that participation to this shared story involves acts of sharing transportable stances and cosmopolitan emotions, articulated mainly in the subjunctive mode. The article contributes to the analysis of multimodal posts as visual small stories and the study of sharing emotions online

Mobilizing Grief and Remembrance with and for Networked Publics: towards a Typology of <i>Hyper</i>-Mourning

The past decade has seen an intense mobilization of grief and remembrance on social media linked to the injunction to inscribe, share, and curate life and death in the here-and-now. This article navigates the heterogeneity of these practices, using the term hyper-mourning to point both to the conditioning of mourning by the affordances of hyper-connectivity and to debates around these emerging forms of mourning as being emotionally hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ reactions to death events. Based on the discussion of select examples, I sketch out a typology of hyper-mourning, depending on the different story positions of teller, co-teller, or witness from which such performances are produced. As I argue, these different performances become typically associated with particular modes of affective positioning made available to the recipients of these shared stories - namely positions of proximity or distance to the death event and the dead, the networked recipient(s), and the emotional self. This typology proposes a small stories approach to hyper-mourning practices, which are organized around the mobilization of grief and remembrance for connecting networked audiences around identities, affect, and moral values dis/alignments. The article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of digital cultures of memory, affect, and identities

“R.I.P. man…u are missed and loved by many”: entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest In Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the entextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Sharing Small Stories of Life and Death Online: Death-writing of the Moment

This article discusses public (and semi-public) reactions to death events attracting media and social media attention, described here as spectacular death sharing online. Based on the empirical study of sample cases—predominantly involving the death of white, often young, adults—I show how different kinds of spectacular death events are shared as small stories. I explore the key types of death selected for sharing online, the linguistic and narrative styling of these selections and the networked uptake of the shared stories of life and death. Addressing sharing practices of life and death at these different levels arguably allows an insight into the way the tellability of death is extended in digital time-spaces and its implications for the visibility of death, dying, and mourning. Sharing life and death as small stories of the moment is found to involve practices of death-writing of the moment, which are intimately connected to salient forms of broadcasting the self-online as life-writing of the moment (Georgakopoulou 2017). This mode of sharing offers a window to broader tensions arising from public displays of emotion and the changing—and often antagonistic—forms of testimony in contemporary networked societies

#JeSuisCharlie? Hashtags as narrative resources in contexts of ecstatic sharing

Uses of hashtags as storytelling devices have received little attention so far in the field of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. This article seeks to fill this gap by providing a narrative-discourse perspective on how hashtags are used as resources for sharing and story making (Androutsopoulos, 2014; Georgakopoulou, 2015a, 2015b, in press), foregrounding narrative as a circulatory drive on social media. The data for analysis are drawn from Twitter and the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the deadly attacks at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo offices on January 7th, 2015. The analysis looks at the emergence and circulation of hashtags #CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie in their polylingual instantiations. Its findings point to the hashtags’ metalinguistic, metadiscursive and metanarrative functions in relation to positions of narrative stancetaking made available to networked publics. It is argued that hashtag sharing in this case attests to a shift from modes of ecstatic global news reporting and spectatorships of suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006) to modes of ecstatic sharing on social media which create dividing lines of evaluative assessments of the events. The study contributes to the empirical study of hashtagging as social and discourse practice

‘Everywhere I go, you’re going with me’ : time and space deixis as affective positioning resources in shared moments of digital mourning

This article presents findings from an empirical study of sharing practices on a Facebook memorial site and draws attention to the uses of time and space deixis as affective positioning resources. Using Androutsopoulos׳s (2014) framework for the empirical analysis of sharing online, the article examines practices of selecting, styling, and negotiating in significant moments of mourning online, focusing on the entextualizations of a female user shared over the course of a six-month period. The analysis shows how sharers mobilize discursive resources to construct their multifaceted identities as mourners in the local context of the memorial site as well as in the wider situational context of public mourning online. In addition, findings indicate how sharers use time and space deixis to construe spatiotemporal framings and position themselves interactionally and affectively to the dead, the networked mourners, and their digitally entextualized mutable self. It is argued that shifts from static to dynamic construals of time (‘tonight’ vs. ‘everynight’) and space (‘up there’ vs. ‘everywhere’) are linked to shifts from positions of relative disempowerment to positions of empowerment and agency for the sharer in the context of public mourning. The article offers insights relevant to the study of public mourning in relation to digital performances of self and it contributes to the empirical study of time and space deixis in discourse and participation online