The Information Society, 29: 152–163, 2013 Published with license by Taylor & Francis ISSN: 0197-2243 print / 1087-6537 online DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2013.777300 Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning Jed R. Brubaker, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish Department of Informatics, School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California, USA Online identities survive the deaths of those they represent, leav- ing friends and families to struggle with the appropriate ways to in- corporate these identities into the practices of grief and mourning, raising important questions. How are practices of online memori- alization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role of online digital identity postmortem? How do trajectories of death and dying incorporate both online and offline concerns? Based on our qualitative study of death and mourn- ing online, we identify the way that social networking sites enable expansion—temporally, spatially, and socially—of public mourn- ing. Rather than looking at online practices as disruptions of tra- ditional practices of grief and memorialization, we examine them as new sites in which public mourning takes place. Keywords death, dying, bereavement, social network sites, Facebook In the few short years since its launch, Facebook has permeated the daily lives of its users. More than just a space where one can craft an online profile or connect with other users, Facebook is a space where one can share the details of one’s life, from the mundane (“Joe is enjoy- ing his morning coffee”) to the monumental (“Joe is en- gaged”). As Facebook has become further integrated into both the everyday and major events of our lives, and its user base has become both larger and more diverse, prac- tices surrounding death have likewise begun to emerge. c  Jed R. Brubaker, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish We are grateful to all of those who participated in this study. We are also grateful to Margarita Rayzberg, Lynn Dombrowski, Ellie Harmon, and Sen Hirano, who provided feedback during the writing of this piece. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under EAGER number 1042678. Address correspondence to Jed R. Brubaker, Department of In- formatics, Donald Bren Hall 5042, Donald Bren School of Informa- tion and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3440, USA. Web: http://www.jedbrubaker.com; E-mail: jed. brubaker@uci.edu While existing work has documented how bereaved users reappropriate social network sites (SNSs) to memo- rialize the dead postmortem (e.g., Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Carroll and Landry 2010; DeGroot 2008), in this ar- ticle we adopt a perimortem perspective and turn our atten- tion to the experiences of users during the time surround- ing death. Specifically, we consider the ways in which Facebook is associated with an expansion of death-related experiences—temporally, spatially, and socially. Face- book creates a new setting for death and grieving—one that is broadly public with an ongoing integration into daily life. Critically, this is not simply about death, but about the trajectories of social engagement around death—in preparation, at the moment of passing, in the discovery of the death of a friend, and in the ongoing memorialization and grieving. In this article, we present findings from interviews con- ducted during an ongoing study of death in the context of SNSs. Based on an analysis of qualitative data from inter- views with sixteen Facebook users, we highlight the role of Facebook in learning about the death of a friend, pro- viding a mediated space for grieving and remembrance, and participating in an expanding set of death- and grief- related practices. This article is structured as follows: We first provide background from the field of death and dying. We then review related literature focused on online systems and death—including collaborative systems, cybermemorials, and SNSs. We then describe our methods and results of this study. We close with a discussion of the relationship between SNS activities and the evolving ecology of death- related practices in which Facebook is situated. RELATED WORK The American Way of Death Cultural beliefs are deeply embedded within human expe- riences of grief and practices around death. Kastenbaum 152 Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries] at 10:10 21 May 2013