How do we deal with death in the digital age? In recent weeks and months, social media has been unremittingly macabre, reacting to the passing of artists, public figures and political heroes. Lou Reed. Nelson Mandela. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Bob Crow. Tony Benn. Sue Townsend. Most recently, 25-year-old journalist and socialite Peaches Geldof was found dead in her home, and after everyone from Boy George to the Irish prime minister tweeted their condolences, the commentariat queued up to ask – had the “frenzy” of digital mourning gone too far? Was the handwringing just unscrupulous new media “cashing in” on tragedy?
Memorial hashtags, selfies at funerals, maudlin Facebook memorial pages, orchestrated mobs of mourning for the latest celebrity to die young. The consensus amongst the self-designated guardians of cultural standards is that internet grief has become monstrously inappropriate, an insult to propriety. In fact, what is monstrous is not the awkward intersection of modern media and public mourning. What is monstrous is the fact that twenty-five-year-olds die before their time. What is inappropriate is the fact that brave activists and beloved writers continue to age,sicken and die right when we need their wisdom and courage more than ever. It is not social media that makes these deaths shocking. Death itself is shocking, and remains so in every medium. As Judith Butler wrote in Violence, Mourning, Politics: “What grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others holds us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain . . . Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
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