“They Are Not Gone – yet!” : Social Media Users’ Reaction to the Perceived Death of Cyber Acquaintances

Asian Journal of Media and Communication E-ISSN: 2579-6119, P-ISSN: 2579-6100 Volume 6, Number 1, 2022 “They Are Not Gone – yet!”: Iranian Social Media Users’ Reaction to the Perceived Death of Cyber Acquaintances Mohammad Memarian Media Management, Management Faculty, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Abstract. Through in-depth interviews with 28 Iranian social media users, this paper examined the reaction of social media users to the perceived death of their online friends in order to find common threads of anxieties and uncertainties among users who experienced such events. We found that subjects experience contextual, cognitive and emotional difficulties in absorbing the news, leading them to go through an initial stage of wandering before dealing with the actual trauma. Such difficulties are categorized in terms of 5 generic conditions: Conceptual Dilemma, Rational Denial, Situational Puzzlement, Relational Confusion, and Environmental Inconsistency. With ample examples, we have discussed each condition and their interrelatedness. It seems that rather than an absolute fact, the death of an online friend is understood, or felt, as a fuzzy state of mixed presence and absence, in relation to which later death events in online or even offline situations may be understood. Article Info Article History Received: 24 February 2022 Revised: 5 April 2022 Accepted: 7 May 2022 Keywords: Medium, Social Media, Death, Friends, Trauma, Reaction. 1. Introduction A few years ago, I was invited by a friend to a small, closed-circle group in a popular messaging app. The group was created to share pieces of literary value, either their own writings or passages they came across in their readings. One morning, a group member named Ali, resident of a far-located city in southeastern Iran, wrote something about the strangeness of death. Replying to him, I said that death sometimes paid us a surprise visit, catching him off-guard in the middle of everything else that went on in life. Furthermore, he said that some people were lucky enough to be waiting for its arrival. Another member of the group then privately told me that Ali had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and his days were numbered. She also told me that we wouldn’t speak directly about Ali’s condition in the group. Ali and I managed to keep the appearances of normal conversation in the group, though it was anything but normal to me. Less than two months later, Ali passed away after being in a coma for several days. He apparently didn’t manage to resolve his wonder at the Copyright © 2022 Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-sa/4.0/) 1 Volume 6, Number 1, 2022, 1-18 “definitive” meeting with death, not at least consciously so. Group members pooled their resources together to send a bouquet with a note of condolence to his funeral. The experience was an odd one for me, the first of many to come, i.e. getting close to someone on a purely online basis only to have to deal with their death. And in every instance of such experiences afterwards, I was reminded of Ali, and how difficult a time I had resolving my many unprecedented issues with his death. The core situation I have explored here may be boiled down to losing someone you had some significant interaction with but you had never personally met, or in other words, someone with whom you interacted via a medium. Therefore, even though the World Wide Web in general and social media in particular have fundamentally changed the way we practice interpersonal communication (Bailenson et al., 2008), one may find instances of this situation whenever and wherever humans used a medium to communicate. Modern communication technologies have had a multi-layered effect on this phenomenon. To begin with, on their surface, they have not only made people more aware of the death events which used to go unnoticed in former times since “[i]n the immediate aftermath of a death, social media platforms may serve as a vital communication tool” (Scourfield et al., 2020), but also democratized the specific experience at hand, making it, fortunately or not, available to almost anyone with regular access to web and significant interest in cyber activity, as they have done to numerous other human experiences previously available only to some select few, such as journalism (Atton, 2008), political activity (Kahne & Bowyer, 2018), or maintaining a public gallery of their photographs (Serafinelli, 2018, p. 153). In addition, they have provided the bereaved with profoundly different possibilities to communicate about grief and mourning (Moyer & Enck, 2020; Westerlund, 2020), virtually interact with the deceased’s friends (Blower & Sharman, 2021), and produce narratives to make the loss one’s own (Karkar & Burke, 2020), all by creating a space for digital storytelling about grief and bereavement (Rolbiecki et al., 2021). It also should be noted that, as of writing this paper, the Corona pandemic has made this specific experience even more universal “in this hour of grief and anxiety” (Binjola & Patel, 2020), and it is expected that more empirical studies provide us with a better understanding of the effects of the pandemic on bereavement (Stroebe & Schut, 2021). The speed, colorfulness, and ubiquity of the new media have also removed many former temporal and spatial barriers, paving the way for a far more immersive experience of the interaction as Miguel (2018) has argued. This may bring about deeper levels of closeness which would potentially make the death of cyber companions a more traumatic event. 2 Mohammad Memarian, “They Are Not Gone – yet!”:Iranian Social Media Users’ Reaction to the Perceived Death of Cyber Acquaintances Artificial intelligence used in social media platforms to tailor the contents for individual users might have a role to play too, though the nature and scale of its role is ambiguous due primarily to a lack of access to the algorithms it applies (for a thorough discussion, see: Bechmann & Bowker, 2019). Some scholars, however, maintained that the platforms tended to create semi-isolated islands of same-minded people in what was best known as audience segmentation (Fowler et al., 2017), which was perhaps an extension of the already-established fact that “people seek the information they agree with… to reduce cognitive dissonance” (Thurber, 2017). According to some scholars, however, the new media have brought about more fundamental changes in our perception of communication and the world in which it occurs. In her authoritative account of such changes, Turkle (2011) argued that for the children brought up around modern technologies, communicability becomes a measure of livingness. She argued that computers “turned children into philosophers” (Turkle, 2011, p. x), and pragmatic ones for that matter, who now talk “about robots as a (...truncated)