Global Mediatized Death and Emotion: Parasocial Grieving—Mourning #stephenhawking on Twitter

Social Media and Mediatization of Death and Mourning

Like conventional media, social media play a crucial role in the mediatization process. The social media mediatization process has transformed human relations and behaviors and brought changes in society and culture (Giaxoglou, 2020). In the mediatization process, media serve as an independent social institution governed by its own sets of rules and shape other social and cultural institutions, and modes of interaction are changed because of the growth of media’s influence (Hjarvard, 2008; Morse, 2018). Social media logics, such as institutional function and technological affordances influence users’ actions and reactions in both institutional and everyday communication (Giaxoglou, 2020; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018). Technological affordances are the relational structure between technology and users that allows or constraints communicative practices or behavioral outcomes (Evans et al., 2017). Social media affordances promote textual and visual communication that enable individuals and communities to share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated contents with textual and visual cues, such as GIFs, memes, pictures, emoji, and hashtags (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Rathnayake & Ntalla, 2020). Such technological affordances shape everyday social media practices and affective communication online.

The social media mediatization process substitutes many social events that previously took place in face-to-face settings, such as death, loss, and mourning (Schulz, 2004; Sofka, 2009; Wagner, 2018). Public encounters with death events through media where media serve as a social institution and create space to perform relevant death rituals. Social mediated death and mourning have made a return from the private sphere to the public sphere, in which individuals respond to death events as part of their everyday life events and relationships (Lagerkvist, 2013; Walter et al., 2012). Death images and events are now mediated by visual and digital communication technologies, in which people across the globe perform and cope with death events thoroughly in and by media (Gibson, 2007b). The technological affordance of social media shapes the mediated mourning (or grieving) process. For example, when someone dies, social media mourners express their grief and emotions by updating information, sharing pictures, posting short notes or narratives on the deceased’s social media wall (e.g., “RIP” or “I miss you”); praising the deceased’s virtues and sharing memories (Brubaker et al., 2013; Chowdhury & Akhther, 2018; Courbet et al., 2014; Islam, 2017; Moore et al., 2019; Hogan & Quan-Haase, 2010). Thus, social media logics shape mourners’ affective and commemorative practices.

Global Mediatized Emotion and Communities of Mourning on Twitter

Mediatized emotion is conceptualized as digital affect culture that is practiced and shaped by communication and influenced an individual’s communicative actions (Döveling et al., 2018). Emotion is a discursively constructed cultural practice or product “guided by implied norms of what and how individuals should feel and how they should express and ‘do emotions’ in any given relational context” (Döveling et al., 2018, p. 2). Three intersecting levels of affective culture or emotional flows are manifested through digital memorial activity, such as micro, meso, and macro-level (Döveling et al., 2018; Giaxoglou, 2020; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018). The micro-level manifestation occurs when people experience a personal loss and grief, or emotional intensity and attachment become shared locally. The meso level of emotional flow intersects online when groups of emotionally resonant individuals come together and grief for their loss and find social support.

On the other hand, collective or macro-level emotional flows are shared or negotiated through various discourses and imagery manifestations online. These affective intensity levels and attachments constitute three core characteristics of digital affect culture, including discourse, belonging, and alignment (Döveling et al., 2018; Giaxoglou, 2020; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018). As digital affect cultures are discursively constructed through emotional alignment, such alignment provides feelings of belonging or connectedness. Such cultures are multi-directional where emotional flows intersect and feed into each other and create ‘dynamics between local and global, the personal and the public’ (Döveling et al., 2018, p. 3). For example, technological affordances of Twitter, especially the use of hashtags, form commemorative communication and increase such emotional resonance (Bulck & Larsson, 2017). As structural communicative devices, hashtags can be used as a discursive marker that engages users in a conversation responding to a particular topic or event and coalesces multiple related discussions under one banner (Highfield, 2018; Highfield & Leaver, 2016). It allows discursive flexibility where the use of a single phrase makes a concise topical connection that includes users and social context.

Hashtags may be used as an affective performance and expression of emotion or reaction, in which the use of emoji combining textual elements (e.g., #RIPStephenHawkings, #RIPmichaeljackson) allow discursive versatility and provide personal perspective and affiliation connecting to the hashtags (Akhther, 2017; Highfield, 2018; Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Papacharissi, 2015). The discursively constructed subject position, especially shared use of context-specific hashtags connects other fellow mourners across the globe and increases the breadth and width of the messages, which, in turn, forms “communities of mourning” on Twitter (Gibson, 2007a). Some high-profile celebrity deaths have the power to create such communities of mourning or practice like Michael Jackson (Hoe-Lian Goh & Sian Lee, 2011), and these communities of practice are formed and controlled in and through social media.

Parasocial Relationship, Celebrity Death, and Parasocial Grieving

Social media have changed the dynamics by providing audiences on a global scale with powerful ways to express grief for a stranger’s loss, such as media personality and public figures with whom mourners may have never met in-person (Quan-Haase, 2016). Celebrities form and maintain parasocial relationships (PSRs) with the audience by and through media, which is one-sided and non-reciprocated (DeGroot & Leith, 2018; Horton & Wohl, 1956; Quan-Haase, 2016). Social media engage the audience actively and bond fans’ parasocial attachment with celebrities. It also facilitates access to similar others who share the parasocial attachment with the same media figure. Because of parasocial attachment, when a celebrity or fictional character dies, the fan community feels “parasocial breakup” ( Cohen, 2003) with the celebrity, and they experience grief for their parasocial loss (Sanderson & Cheong, 2010). Parasocial grieving involves a withdrawal of emotional investment for the lost celebrity, which can be comparable to losing a close or real social contact (Wong & Patlamazoglou, 2020). In such a distressful situation, social media offer space to cope with death where virtual communities come together to express emotions and share the experience with their PSRs (Sanderson & Cheong, 2010).

Though conventional media play a significant role in providing information about the death of celebrities and key public figures, social media serve as a valuable tool for parasocial grieving through which the audience can practice and express emotions, reactions, and share memories publicly and globally (Quan-Haase, 2016). For instance, after the death of pop music icon Michael Jackson, fan communities came together on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and TMZ.com) and showed varied forms of emotional responses for their parasocial loss, such as acceptance, anger, bargaining, and depression (Sanderson & Cheong, 2010). Though fans expressed anger, denial, and depression toward Jackson’s death, scholars argued that social media facilitated the acceptance of the parasocial loss (i.e., “you are now in a better place where people can no longer hurt you”; p. 333) rather than denying it. Radford and Bloch (2012) found similar stages of parasocial griefs in response to the death of race car driver Dale Earnhardt, Sr.

In addition to these stages of parasocial grieving, communities on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit showed varied forms of parasocial attachments, including sadness, over acceptance, condolences, love, longing, shock, and confusion, after the deaths of television character Lawrence Kutner, musician David Bowie, and NBA legend Kobe Bryant (Bingaman, 2020; Bulck & Larsson, 2017; DeGroot & Leith, 2018). Fan communities released their emotional pain through the expression of sadness. Expression of love and longing showed an intense feeling of affection and admiration associated with parasocial attachments. Conversely, expressions of shock and confusion represented sudden disbelief and uncertainty towards the deaths. Besides, fan communities adopted a different mechanism to cope with their parasocial losses. They coped with grief by consuming or watching celebrities’ creations and products as well as shared memories with the deceased, and reminiscence their work and contributions. They also advocated establishing a legacy for PSRs by acknowledging their inventions and contributions. However, the adoption of such coping mechanisms may depend on the types of celebrities, deaths, and their contribution to the community. For example, in response to Robin Williams’ death, the fan community coped with their loss by sharing health information, such as clinical depression, suicide prevention, and Parkinson’s disease, and findings suggest that celebrity cancer death influence fans’ sharing of awareness messages and information, which shape their prosocial behavior (Cohen & Hoffner, 2016; Myrick, 2017).

Taken together, guided by the theory of mediatization of death and emotion, this study examined how the global online community portrayed PSRs through the grieving process toward high-profile celebrity death, which shaped global mediatized emotion as digital affect culture. To this regard, we asked the following research questions:

RQ1. In what ways did the global community display grief responding to Stephen Hawking’s death?

Data Collection

A total of 636 public tweets were collected for this study. The data collection process includes several steps. First, the authors explored hashtags using keywords— “RIP Stephen Hawking hashtags on Twitter” into Google search engine. Then, the first seven hashtags that appeared in the search were selected for the data collection purpose. These hashtags include #ripstephenhawking, #stephenhawkingrip, #riphawking, #ripstephenhawkings, #RIPHawkings, #stephenhawkingdied, and #stephenhawkingdeath. Second, the hashtags were plugged into an official Twitter page to gather related tweets. We manually collected tweets by using selected hashtags. In so doing, we utilized Twitter’s search filter function people—from anyone and location—anywhere. All data were captured using the snipping tool in an image format. We created seven separate folders to archive tweets related to each hashtag. Finally, all image-formatted textual data were copied and pasted from the individual hashtag folder to a separate MS word document for human coding.

Analysis

The textual data were analyzed by using a phronetic iterative approach (Tracy, 2013, 2018) to thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Thematic analysis is a systematic process of interpreting meaning from data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The iterative approach allowed both theoretical and data-driven thematic analysis, where existing scholarships and theoretical constructs helped developing codes and themes. Also, back and forth readings of the data helped to identify new codes and themes (Tracy, 2013, 2018). In doing so, we developed and categorized conceptual codes and subthemes followed by DeGroot and Leith’s (2018) and Sanderson and Cheong’s (2010) parasocial expression of grief (i.e., sadness, shock, love, etc.) and coping mechanism (i.e., reminiscing, memorializing, advocacy, etc.). We theoretically analyzed the stages of parasocial grieving by employing Döveling et al.’s (2018) mediatized emotion framework.

Coding Scheme and Trustworthiness

Each textual tweet was the unit of analysis and coded independently. To begin, the first author read through all the tweets for a general understanding of the dataset. Using open coding, descriptive notes and labels for each tweet were taken in the document margin of MS word, which helped to categorize and compare the codes for thematic and theoretical analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Tracy, 2018). Line-by-line reading of the dataset and descriptive notes or labels helped to generate initial codes associated with parasocial grief. A separate MS Word document was created where exemplar tweets were copied into collated codes, including descriptive notes. The author revisited initial codes and tweets and engaged in axial coding to compare between collated tweets and formed sub-themes relating to parasocial grief and coping mechanisms. Dataset and descriptive notes were also revisited to identify new codes and sub-themes. Then, both authors closely reviewed and categorized exemplar tweets to compare and connect across sub-themes and determine the consistency. Our closing reading of the categorized data set also helped to modify and remove redundant sub-themes and exemplar tweets.

Employing mediatized emotion framework (Döveling et al., 2018), we categorized and reorganized sub-themes under broader themes for theoretical analysis. A total of eleven sub-themes was emerged and categorized into three broader themes. Table 1 includes themes and sub-themes below. Back and forth readings of the exemplar tweets, themes, and the entire data helped the authors to revise and refine sub-themes and themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and construct a coherent connection between parasocial grieving and mediatized emotion. Debriefing sessions between the authors helped to identify and resolve discrepancies between exemplar tweets, codes, and themes. Also, the use of exemplar tweets enhanced the credibility and trustworthiness of the findings (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Tracy, 2013, 2018). All quotations are presented in original form.

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Table 1.

Themes and Sub-Themes Associated With Mediatized Emotion and Parasocial Grieving.

Themes	Sub-themes
Mediatized emotional expression of grief	Expression of sadness
	Expression of longing
	Expression of love
	Expression of confusion
Mediatized coping mechanisms	Individualized tributes
	Reminiscing
	Memorializing
	Advocacy
Mediatized emotion and post-death identity	Scientist identity—disability
	Science and religious ideology—atheist

Mediatized Emotional Expression of Grief

Our findings showed that social media mourners expressed varied forms of emotion and grief following the death of Stephen Hawking, which was consistent with the parasocial grieving model (DeGroot & Leith, 2018), such as sadness, shock, confusion, love, and longing. Some emotional expressions of grief were consistently displayed and showed televisual features of the mediated death where tweet messages included images, videos, emoji, and hashtags commemorating the late Stephen Hawking. The major sub-themes are discussed.

Mediatized Coping Mechanisms

The second theme showed how the global online community performed different death rituals to cope with Hawking’s death. Tweets demonstrated both new and traditional forms of coping strategies that mourners adopted to alleviate their grief, such as creating individualized tributes, reminiscing, or discussing memories, and celebrating Hawking’s accomplishments and contribution to the universe. The major sub-themes are discussed with illustrative tweets.

Mediatized Emotion and Post-Death Identity

The third theme showed how mourners’ affective communication discursively constructed a post-death identity where they recognized Hawking as a scientist connecting with his physical condition (i.e., disability) and religious ideology (i.e., atheist).