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March 7, 2008

Mourning on Social Networks

(Note: This post originally appeared on PopandPolitics.com.)

After the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, many members of social networking sites changed their profile pictures to a VT ribbon, in honor of the victims of the shooting. The ribbon often appeared in either black or maroon, symbolizing either mourning for the dead or support for the VT community. When the shootings at Northern Illinois University took place last week, NIU memorial ribbons similarly became widespread on Facebook and MySpace. Being a "Huskie," the school's mascot, was not only a meaningful label for NIU students, faculty and staff, but suddenly also for the extended community that radiated out from NIU memorial groups and the friends and families of the victims.

The shared visual language of these two tragedies, signals more generally how we are approaching mourning online. The images of the ribbon and the mascot are quickly and easily reproducible in a digital environment, creating what could be considered a "brand" of mourning. In an environment where copying and pasting is a regular act of creation, survivor guilt becomes easier to address. Being public about one's guilt or mourning has always been an important part of moving forward after a loss. The cross-cultural ancient rituals surrounding death -- dressing and viewing the deceased, the celebration of life, the placing of markers at gravesites -- are ways for mourners to participate publicly in moving forward.

The act of memorialization is the first step in a form of forgetting, each distinct practice of mourning being a stylization of a culture's particular needs. In these cases, joining in the online visual culture of mourning appears to play an important role in dealing with survivor guilt, giving internet users a simple way to express their grief. Many of the Facebook and MySpace users changing their profile pictures this week, for example, are not members of the immediate NIU community.

Using corporate language and branding tactics nonetheless may be less than ideal, as it expresses noncommercial mourning and guilt in a readymade language of commodity advertisement. The juxtaposition is at once disconcerting and entirely natural. In the case of the school shootings, the corporate university brands are more than familiar; they are the iconic images of a carefully wrought visual culture of power, strength and courage. On a very basic level, they convey what needs conveying and so they rose to the top of the great mix of our ever-expanding digital raw material.

What is particularly interesting about the Facebook and MySpace community's response to the NIU Shootings is the rapid production of these spaces and user-created media about the shootings. The Facebook group Pray for Northern Illinois University Students and Families was created a mere hour and a half after the shootings occurred and membership rose exponentially, to 103,358 members a mere two days after its inception.

Similarly, countless digital memorials to 9/11 have been created even while the process of creating the physical memorial continues. Both groups feature media made by mourners, a digital equivalent of the items left at roadside memorials and spontaneous shrine sites. Media offerings include documentation of the spontaneous shrines at NIU, of the six crosses representing the shooter and his victims, and user-created images of solidarity and support.Most of these images are composed of the NIU memorial ribbon and another university's logo and the words "Today, we are all Huskies."Collective folk responses such as these have been common at sites of mass tragedy; for example, teddy bears were a popular theme at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and dog tags were often left at the Vietnam Veterans memorial.

Activism also plays into online memorials, perhaps more intensely than it does for physical memorials. Nearly all of the Facebook and MySpace memorials address the Westboro Baptist Church's announcement that "God sent the Shooter...WBC will picket their hypocritical funerals & memorials & "vigils."" WBC pickets many vigils, memorials, funerals and public gatherings in response to mass tragedy and loss such as the funerals of soldiers, hate crime victim Matthew Shepard and other school shootings because the church sees these events as God's "Wrath & Vengeance Against an Ungrateful Nation that has Forsaken Him & Embraced Filthy Fags." In response, there was a call from members connected to the Facebook and MySpace memorials to set up a counter-protest and later promote when and where the counter-protests would take place:

One user, Marion Dzwonnik, composed a YouTube Video threat in response to WBC's plans:

Another, Rich Peters III, "J.R.", made a vlog questioning the WBC congregation on how it would act if a shooter opened fire on one of its services:

In general, the amount of user-created media and responses to the NIU shootings is already astounding, and we probably won't see this response fade very quickly. Other tragedies, such as the Virginia Tech Shootings, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, are still generating new-media creation. And while I've only taken a look at responses on two social networking sites, the landscape of online mourning extends to video- and image-sharing sites, virtual worlds and practically any other online community space.

• Posted by Sara Hebert at 4:52PM on 03/ 7/08
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