Digital Life of Grief

This book investigates how mourning is transformed in the digital age, where grief is mediated by algorithms, circulated through hashtags, and shaped by the economies of social media platforms.

This timely edited collection explores the rise of digital mourning practices, from TikTok memorials and grief influencers to the politicisation of loss in activist movements. Through a platform-centric lens, the book examines how contemporary grief unfolds publicly, performatively, and often unequally in online spaces. This collection brings together interdisciplinary scholarship using methods including digital ethnography, visual analysis, and platform critique to reveal the architectures that govern digital mourning. It shows how platform logics determine whose grief is amplified and whose is erased, how moderation policies impact the persistence of loss online, and how mourning is entangled with attention economies, digital labour, and resistance. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of how digital spaces both enable and constrain emotional expression, community care, and memory work during times of grief.

This book will be essential reading for scholars across media and communication studies, death studies, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It offers conceptual and methodological tools to engage critically with grief’s digital turn, addressing questions of visibility, performance, politics, and platform governance. As mourning becomes increasingly public, networked, and algorithmically structured, this book provides a necessary account of how grief is being reshaped in a rapidly changing media landscape.

Katrin Gerber is an end-of-life research fellow with a PhD in psychology at RMIT University, Melbourne. Her research explores the intersection of creative methods, mental health, and death studies, with current focus on digital media and AI in grief.

Larissa Hjorth is a digital ethnographer, socially-engaged artist, and ARC Future Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne. With nearly three decades of experience in mobile media research, she has published extensively on intergenerational connection, intimacy, play, ageing, loss and death in digital contexts.

Crystal Abidin is a digital anthropologist at Curtin University, Perth, and Director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab. Her research focuses on influencer cultures, online visibility, and social media practices in the Asia Pacific region, with numerous books on internet celebrity and platform cultures. Reach her at wishcrys.com.