Jed Brubaker’s Advancement to Candidacy is coming up. He’s on the ball enough that there is time to announce it!

February 29th, 12:00PM, DBH 5011

Committee:
Gillian R. Hayes (advisor)
Paul Dourish
Melissa Mazmanian
Geoffrey Bowker
Martha Feldman (PPD)

Post-mortem Social Networking: Unearthing new spaces of death and grief

“After we die, our online accounts live on. By one estimate, over 408,000 U.S. Facebook users died in 2011 alone. This leaves friends and families with both the opportunity and struggle of incorporating these identities into their practices of grief and mourning. The presence of post-mortem profiles raises important questions: How are practices of online memorialization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role of the profile post-mortem? How do trajectories of death and dying incorporate both online and offline concerns? I present findings from two studies that detail the emerging phenomena of post-mortem profiles and of ongoing experiences with the deceased via social network sites (what I call “post-mortem social networking”). These new practices highlight spatial, temporal, and social expansions enabled by social network site infrastructure, and let us consider their impact on online behavior more broadly.”