Mondays with Mike: Death and Facebook

Communication technology breakthroughs have always been scary and disruptive—the invention of the printing press, to name one, was considered an enormous threat to the of order of the day. As were inventions like the telephone and television.

The technologies themselves have never been good or evil per se. It’s the behavior of  people who use the technologies that are good or evil. The current technological power may be unprecedented, but really, in terms of the hill we humans have to constantly climb regarding behavior and ethics remains the same.

Take Twitter. In my lifetime, by my view, we’ve always had an analog version of it: bumper stickers. A car whizzes by, or sits there parked; the sticker—a virtual middle finger—reads “I’m right, you’re wrong,” later! Oh sure, Twitter is theoretically “interactive,” but really, online forums don’t invite true conversations; they enable us to chuck spears back and forth. Unless we decide not to.

And Facebook? Sure, there’s good (outside of its corporate behavior). But the analog to the bad in Facebook, to me, has always been the Christmas letter. Or at least some Christmas letters (I’m not a total Grinch). The ones from people we’re out of touch with that detail everything from kids’ test scores to bouts with IBS. If you’re in my inner circle and I’m in yours, I’d already know. If not, and you just want to say you’re thinking of someone, well, that’s where Christmas cards come in.

What got me thinking about all this was a piece in The Atlantic on the difference between grieving and mourning in the age of social media. The author had lost her young sister to cancer. And she observed what happened online in the aftermath—it wasn’t all good. In the piece she does not condemn social media, but invites participants to think about what they’re doing in times of other people’s loss. The basic idea is that there are people grieving a terrible loss, and what you do in mourning online can help or hurt. Or perhaps, best, do nothing.

She starts by describing a modern phenomenon: Learning on social media that someone died. Here’s a taste of her phenomenally well written and considered piece:

The morning after my sister Lauren died was cold and quiet, a mid-March prairie dawn, lit by gray half-light. For several hours I tried to figure out how to get out of bed. The most routine tasks are extraordinarily difficult in the early days of grief—Lauren’s death had torn a hole in my universe, and I knew the moment I moved I would fall right through it. Meanwhile, across the city, a former classmate of Lauren’s learned of her death. I’m still not sure how—she hadn’t kept in touch with Lauren during the three years since they graduated high school. But bad news travels astonishingly fast. The classmate selected what is perhaps the only picture of the two of them together, and decided to post it on Lauren’s timeline. Beneath it, she wrote “RIP” and something about heaven gaining an angel.

This Facebook post is how many of Lauren’s close friends learned that she had died. We—her family—hadn’t yet been able to call people. The first post sparked a cascade of statuses and pictures, many from people who barely knew her. It was as though an online community felt the need to claim a stake in her death, through syrupy posts that profoundly misrepresented who she was and sanitized what had happened to her.

The author goes on to spotlight the important difference between mourning, which is a public act, and grieving, which is private and internal. She doesn’t condemn social media outright, and acknowledges that it may be valuable in terms of shared mourning. (BTW, I came to find the article via…social media.) She just says let’s be careful and thoughtful out there.

She concludes with this advice about how to behave on social media in the wake of a death:

My proposal is simple: Wait. If the deceased is not a close family member, do not take it upon yourself to announce their death online. Consider where you fall in the geography of a loss, and tailor your behavior in response to the lead of those at the center. Listen. Rather than assuming the bereaved are ready for (or comfortable with) Facebook or Twitter tributes, send a private message, or even better, pick up the phone and call.

If you don’t feel comfortable expressing your condolences to the deceased’s friends and family, perhaps it isn’t your place to publicly eulogize.

I’m going to heed that advice, and hope you will, too. I also hope you’ll read the entire piece.