SOCIAL MEDIA

 

THE GLASS BEDROOM

grief and social media

by Lauren Herrala

Old fashioned mourning

If you want to understand a society, pay attention to how it mourns. Our collective response to death says everything about what we value and prioritize in life. Navigating grief in American society has historically been characterized by cultural notions of public and private. As the internet becomes an established part of contemporary life and social media further entangles with our definition of authentic community, public and private space have been completely redefined. This shift in our approach to socialization has massive implications for how we address loss. Social media’s thirst for engagement threatens to reduce our experience of death to mere performance art.

Traditionally grief and mourning are two sides of the same coin, simply the difference between the public and the private. The digital age has blurred this crucial distinction. Erika Pearson’s 2009 essay, "All the World Wide Web’s A Stage" predicted this phenomenon, claiming that through “social media use, the metaphorical wall separating private and public is made of glass, transparent and meant to be seen through.” If mourning is grief with an acknowledged audience, there is no better place for it than online in 2025. For over a decade social media has fostered a new sense of openness with one’s community and that means revealing everything.

In 2013, the funeral selfie “broke the internet” and turned what was once private mourning into social spectacle. As social media has grown and further established itself, it seems that there isn’t any aspect of life that can’t or won’t be shared. It has become a third space where the interior and exterior merge for all to see. As our engagement envelopes more and more of what we experience, grief simply becomes another card on the table. The opportunity for community and self-expression now demands our privacy in exchange. The internet offers an endless space for us to mourn and memorialize loved ones with increasing levels of transparency. While a bereavement leave from the workplace may expire after five days, social media is not inconvenienced by grief. It is a place that welcomes, if not demands our presence in the midst of any and all experiences.

A new uncharted world

To say the least, this is uncharted territory. As public and private life become increasingly indistinguishable, those who are active on social media feel the pressure of both the public and private demands of grief. Social media practically insists that you respond immediately to events, maintaining the appearance of an authentic presence. Despite this, you should keep your statements diplomatic enough to address everyone who might read what you write, now and into the future. Though the internet is in many ways an uninhibited space, social media is riddled with unspoken rules, guidelines for self-policing, and a constantly updating list of faux pas. Maneuvering within this framework is complicated further by constant surveillance (actual or assumed). As we package our loss in a way that withstands perpetual visibility, there comes the gradual impression that presenting our grief is an inherent part of living it. Annette Markham describes this as writing “ourselves into being.” She concludes that—within this type of environment — “to recognize our own existence in any meaningful way, we must be responded to.” When our grief is edited to fit a digital format or presence, there’s an inevitable feedback loop, the performer and the audience demanding “correct” and more content.

In many ways, social media has unraveled nearly a century of social conditioning around grief and the belief that large aspects of it should remain private. Medical advancements in the 20th century detached mourning customs from any physical interaction with the dead, and rendered the communal effort no longer necessary. As grief became disembodied, it was privatized. Prominent modern psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists have all addressed this changing societal relationship to death. Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Gorer, Philips Aries, and Michel Foucault have grappled with the ethics around mourning in cultural modernity. For the past century, death has required nothing more than a solution, be it a cure, a psychoanalytical explanation, or a stoic disposition. In the words of Gorer, “one mourns in private as one undresses or relieves oneself in private, so as not to offend others.”

The quiet mourning of the past

How is it that something we have repressed and stigmatized for generations has reentered the public sphere with such force? I believe the answer is woven into the fabric of social media. Historically, grief without the support of a community has no place to turn but inward. In reopening conversations around grief, we are dealing with the aftermath of decades of internalization. While past generations have had no outlet provided to them, social media has constructed a constant audience for anyone with the slightest interest in going public. The previously accepted view of mourning as extravagant and unnecessary is now facing a new paradigm that is not just cultural, but also economic. Nothing is unnecessary on a platform that monetizes any form of engagement, including death.

Social platforms are fundamentally designed to maximize engagement, and grief, like any emotionally charged content, attracts attention. These platforms are not neutral stages. They are engineered around performance metrics. As the distinction between public and private dissolves, individuals are left in an environment that monetizes visibility. While these algorithms are ever-developing, their effects are becoming apparent among younger generations. The term “native users” has been coined for those of us who have never known a world without social media. Native users are aware—consciously or subconsciously—of the algorithm's objectives. With this comes the compulsion to present grief in ways that align with the unspoken norms of our dominant economic culture.

How to become a content creator

The term content creator couldn’t be more telling. In the late 2000’s, Youtube came up with the title creator, and it has since become the universal term for any individual who devotes themself to maintaining a consistent online presence. Strangely, the title content creator has come to represent a certain level of social prominence and esteem. Yet the title implies your identity is defined by your output; you are simply the producer of entertainment. It’s the equivalent of calling someone a playwright or a musician, only “content” is much more ambiguous than actual plays or music. Grief becomes a commodity the second it joins the world of “content”. That’s a shocking idea when you consider how vulnerable the grief-stricken truly are and how the rituals of grief are now primarily economic rather than cultural. For the 57% of Gen-Z who aspire to have careers as influencers, it is nearly impossible not to observe every major life event as a potential big break. That is the social condition of social media.

In 2025, social media promises fame, legacy, and permanence. This shift has irrevocably altered the way we approach our interactions online. As we curate and share our lives, they become inseparable from notions of disproportionate attention and status. In 2022 there were 200 million content creators profiting from their content creation, no matter how nebulous. Out of 4.2 billion global social media users, 4.7 percent have managed to monetize their content. Though statistically unlikely that the average person will ever become a successful influencer, network algorithms boost favorable content and make overnight fame seem commonplace. Where social media once fostered connection with a preexisting community, it now promotes “content” and promises discovery, a lottery ticket to stardom. So, it’s not surprising that our grief should become a commodity.

The Mourning of Matthew Perry exploded online

Whether we are authentically grieving or capitalizing on an opportunity to steal the limelight is often difficult to decipher. When a cultural figure passes, loving memory posts overwhelm social media feeds. This has resulted in mourning en masse for celebrities like Kobe Bryant and Matthew Perry. Celebrity co-stars and family are expected to immediately craft announcements for the general public expressing, if not flaunting, their relationship to the deceased. “Do I have a photo with the just deceased? It’s the first thing you think of when someone dies,” according to filmmaker Jay Bugler. Parasocial relationships are on full display when everyone is a friend. Through the manufactured participation of social media we are susceptible to feelings of personal involvement, even ownership, over events we absorb “via passive observation online.” And shockingly or not, influencers (as well as normal people) wield death as a tool to gain media attention. Because of this, almost all public grief “reads as strategic—an invitation for sympathy, likes, or cultural proximity.”

If you were to search #griefjourney on instagram, the first available post would be a video montage of a young woman crying in different locations set to a sad song. Upon scrolling further, you would see a photo of two parents holding each other in a hospital room announcing the death of their newborn child who is in the photo as well. There are countless reels and posts like these. My personal explore page recently suggested the account of @anniefitness_, a young widow who frequently vlogs “a day in the life” videos: baking her late husband’s favorite dessert, celebrating the three-month anniversary of his passing. “Come grab coffee with me as a young widow.”

Is this how to mourn?

For the first time in many years, we are openly mourning without apology. We are demanding that we be allowed to indulge in grief with an audience. I am in support of finding creative ways to process loss. However, I feel as if I am watching real grief become personal branding and it feels crass. Our loss is singular and intimately ours until it is subject to the unspoken rules of public consumption. We are not only exhibiting our lives, but impersonating our own grief. You might ask where is the real grief in the midst of the spectacle of grief? Even social apps designed to force spontaneous authenticity like BeReal, struggle to combat our tendency towards a curated persona. Younger users are trained to display every experience without deeply inhabiting it. The most important quality of anything is its aesthetic and economic potential.

Before long, people will be wondering how we can make our grief more compelling to the public, how maybe, if we hold back our tears just a few seconds more, we’ll be showered with likes extolling our bravery. In the sad new world of public mourning, we are all just actors receiving notes from an algorithm.

©The CCA Arts Review and Lauren Herrala