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Entextualising mourning on Facebook:

stories of grief as acts of sharing
a

Korina Giaxoglou
a

Department of Linguistics & Languages, Kingston University

London, London, UK
Published online: 01 Dec 2014.

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To cite this article: Korina Giaxoglou (2014): Entextualising mourning on Facebook: stories of grief
as acts of sharing, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, DOI: 10.1080/13614568.2014.983560
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New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2014.983560

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Entextualising mourning on
Facebook: stories of grief as acts
of sharing
KORINA GIAXOGLOU*
Department of Linguistics & Languages, Kingston University London, London, UK
(Received 23 September 2014; accepted 21 October 2014)
Web 2.0 mourning is said to afford increased opportunities for the deceaseds and mourners
visibility as well as create in the bereaved an increased sense of social support through the
participatory entextualisation of mourning. So far, however, there has been little systematic
attention to the uses of narrative in social network sites. The present article addresses this gap
by providing an analysis of entextualised moments of mourning as stories shared by a single
author over a six-month period on a Facebook Rest in Peace memorial group. The article
foregrounds heterogeneity in narrative activity across posts, linking diversity in ways of telling
to different types of the online mourners positioning at three interrelated levels of discourse
construction: (1) the representation of the event of death, (2) the alignment (or disalignment)
with the dead and the networked mourners and (3) the posters self. It is argued that telling
stories on Facebook memorial sites constitutes an act of sharing affording networked
individuals resources for making meaning out of the meaninglessness of a loved ones death in
ways that can help render the painful experience of loss tellable and also create a sense of
ambient affiliation or affinity with networked mourners.
Keywords: Facebook Rest in Peace (R.I.P.) sites; Death online; Sharing; Digital narrative;
Positioning; Entextualisation; Ambient affiliation

1. Introduction

Following the popularisation of Web 2.0 technologies in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, new web-based platforms characterised by media convergence (e.g. text and video exchanges on YouTube; text and voice chat in
multiplayer online game activities; text, chat, video sharing, and the addition of
bespoke applications on Facebook, and so on) have created increased opportunities for user-generated content and social interaction, structured and facilitated by
the constraints and affordances of specific sites (Herring, 2013, p. 4).
Among the prime new Web 2.0 platforms, social network sites (henceforth
SNSs) encourage the creation of individual public or semi-public profiles within a
bounded system. Within that system, users articulate a list of other users with
*Email: Korina.Giaxoglou@kingston.ac.uk
2014 Taylor & Francis

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K. Giaxoglou

whom they share a connection, view and traverse their list of connections and
those made by others (boyd & Ellison, 2007 cited in Athique, 2013, p. 103)
and generate their own content and discourse in a persistent, replicable, scalable
and searchable way (boyd, 2011). By updating individual profiles and using
social plug-ins, such as the buttons Comment, Like and Share (introduced in 2009
and redesigned in 2013 to appear side by side), networked individuals perform
their self or selves online for a networked audience and with a networked
audience, constructing and co-constructing identities, stories and communities
online. Networked audiences include friends from across different social time
spaces of ones life representing multiple social contexts (e.g. colleagues, family,
friends and acquaintances) and resulting in what is known as context collapse,
i.e. the merging of ones contacts into the flat category of friends (Marwick &
boyd, 2011). To address the multiple networked audience all at the same time,
users find that they often have to engage in intensive impression management
work so as to avoid conflicting self-presentations, especially when posting on
Facebook.
Facebook, the web-based service first launched in the United States in 2005
and currently counting more than 800 million active users daily around the globe1
(Facebook Page, 2014), has become one of the key SNSs for writing or reshaping
selves around personal (or egocentric) networks, constituting a new media
technology of self (Papacharissi, 2011). As Varis and Spotti (2011, p. 4) have
remarked, however, web-based services like Facebook are not simply ephemeral
sites of self-presentation and interaction or technologies of life; they also
constitute a technology of death in that they function as repositories or archives
of digital selves, interactions and communities that survive well after ones
(physical) death. In addition, SNSs often serve as archives of and for digital
memories or tributes to the dead giving rise to a technologically mediatised death
culture (Haverinen, 2014).
Research in social media2 proliferates with a predominant focus on SNSs as
technologies of life, even though recent publications (Christensen & Willerslev,
2013 or the present special issue) attest to a growing interest in the study of deathrelated practices online across a range of disciplines, including sociology,
psychology, media and cultural studies, and sociolinguistics.3 In this line of
research, attention has been drawn to how post-mortem SNS profiles on MySpace,
described as techno-spiritual spaces, continue to be flooded with posts and
updates long after the death of the profile owner, raising important questions relating
to the management of digital identities and legacies (Brubaker & Vertesi, 2010).
Furthermore, studies have provided useful insights into the use of MySpace,
Facebook, Twitter, and online groups and discussion forums sites as spaces for
online grief communication (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2013; Carroll & Landry,
2010; Dobler, 2009; Finlay & Krueger, 2011; Giaxoglou, 2014a; McEwen &
Scheaffer, 2013; Pawelczyk, 2013; Sanderson & Cheong, 2010; Schotanus-Dijkstra
et al., 2014; Swartwood, Veach, Kuhne, Lee, & Ji, 2011; Varis & Spotti, 2011)
adding to the existing body of work on digital death and mourning (see de Vries &
Roberts, 2004; Roberts, 2004). The consensus in this growing body of work is that
the Internet and more recently Web 2.0 is having a felt impact on social and cultural

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Entextualising mourning on Facebook

practices of death, dying and memorialisation affording increased opportunities for

the deceaseds and mourners visibility (Marwick & Ellison, 2012), creating in the
bereaved an increased sense of social support through the participatory entextualisation of mourning (Giaxoglou, 2014b) and functioning as a therapeutic resource for
individual mourners (Worden, 2009, cited in Pawelczyk, 2013) as well as a
supportive online community of and for the bereaved (Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, &
Pitsillides, 2011).
So far, however, there has been little systematic attention to the forms and
functions of narrative in digital environments of mourning. The present article
seeks to fill this gap, by looking at how users draw on stories as resources for
creating alignments vis--vis the recounted events, the recipients of the story, and
their self. The next section will present some of the key terms and insights from
language-focused perspectives to digital communication, which have informed the
present analysis of stories of digital grief on Facebook.
2. Language-focused perspectives to digital communication
2.1. Narrative in sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication

In sociolinguistics, narrative is conceptualised as the transformation of past

events, i.e. a sequence of narrative units labelled as abstract, orientation,
complicating action, resolution, evaluation and coda4 (Labov, 2013) or as a
mode of telling configured along the dimensions of tellership, tellability,
embeddedness, linearity and moral stance5 (Ochs & Capps, 2001). The former
conceptualisation covers the so-called full-formed narratives of personal experience (big stories), while the latter accommodates small stories or fleeting
moments of narrative orientation to the world (Bamberg, 2004; Bamberg &
Georgakopoulou, 2008). Big stories are well-formed narratives of personal
experience whose definitional criterion is temporal sequencing.6 Both perspectives to processes of storying acknowledge that narrative constitutes a powerful
mode for communicating the emotional impact of the tellers experience shaped
according to the expectations of the listener in the interest of the teller. Telling a
story does not only involve the report of a compelling topic, but it also involves
performance, entailing the tellers responsibility to an audience for a display of
communicative competence (Bauman, 1986).
Recent linguistic research in narrative has directed attention to stories as shaped
by new media technologies of communication, noting their departure from big
or canonical stories (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, p. 121). Hoffman and
Eisenlauer (2010), for instance, have noted a certain fragmentation of themes and
perspectives, a versatile access to the narration, a lack of closure and semiotic
flexibility as a result of medium-enabled features. Georgakopoulou (2013a) has
foregrounded the transportability of breaking news stories in different contexts,
both online and offline, foregrounding the potential of narrative to get lifted from
its original context (decontextualisation) and be relocated in a new one
(recontextualisation) via local text and meaning-making mechanisms (entextualisation), acquiring new meanings in the process (see also Bauman & Briggs,
1990). Pages 2012, p. 3 study on Facebook update stories has pointed to the

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K. Giaxoglou

smallness, fleetingness and situatedness of social media stories on the margins

of other kinds of talk and their story-life fragmentary form. In terms of subject
matter, Page found that Facebook updates tend to include stories of seemingly
lightweight reports of everyday activity, updating, for example, networked
friends on what they have had for dinner, as well as reports of affectively
significant life events, such as accounts of illness.
Across social media contexts, users draw on stories to share significant moments
with and for networked audiences, and by doing so create identities for themselves
and the individuals or groups they interact with (Page, 2012). Storytelling as an
activity, either online or offline, is linked to identity constructionin the sense of
alignment with or distancing from othersand to the negotiation of social
relations. As Seargeant and Tagg (2014, p. 13) observe, SNSs facilitate different
types of social organisation, around shared interests, ambient affiliation and in
some cases the extension of offline groups, leading to the development of particular
patterns of group interaction. Research into SNS interaction, then, is to focus on
how these different types of social organisation and interactional group norms come
about, by looking at discourse and communication as situated practices within
networked relationships.
The present articles approach to digital storytelling is grounded in the
aforementioned theoretical findings and insights seeking to extend the scope of
narrative inquiry in sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication to the
study of stories of death and mourning online, which have received little attention
so far. Focus on the study of stories of grief and loss can shed light to the wideranging and diverse ways of telling online (Georgakopoulou, 2013b) and
contribute to a better understanding of how stories are told and received, how
their telling is shaped by properties of the medium and how they are encouraged
or prohibited in different environments and online communities. The next section
outlines the focus of the present discussion, the analytical framework, and the
research questions to be addressed.
2.2. Sharing online with and for a networked audience

Facebook SNS is a Web 2.0 communication technology characterised by sharing,

which has become the fundamental and constitutive activity shaping users mode
of participation in the site (e.g. FB updates, the share button, which encourages
users to bring a page to the attention of other users in a different platform) (John,
2013). SNS participants write themselves into being by telling and sharing,
entextualising moments for a network audience (Androutsopoulos, 2014) and
keying their performance both to the context in which a story is told and to the
recounted events (Bauman, 1986, p. 2). On Facebook SNS spaces for mourning
and commemorating the dead, such as memorial group sites or pages labelled
R.I.P. (Rest in Peace), the things shared are selected entextualised moments of
life and death, i.e. giving shape to textual and multimodal ensembles that harbour
general accessibility and negotiability (Iedema, 2003), encouraging their further
use and recontextualisation for different purposes by different users and across
different media.

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Entextualising mourning on Facebook

The present study will explore digital storytelling and sharing practices,7
extending the use of the notion of entextualisation to the study of social media
(see also Androutsopoulos, 2014; Leppnen, Kytl, Jousmki, Peuronen, &
Westinen, 2014). More specifically, from covering dimensions of text and
meaning-making across contexts, the concept is extended to encompassing the
use of text and semiotic material for entextualising the self into being (Jones,
2013). In other words, social media participants are seen to lift instances of
culture, be it language forms, textual or other semiotic material out of contexts
(decontextualisation) and re-situate them in their discourse and stylistic repertoires (recontextualisation) as a resource for meaning-making and performing
identity and sociality in sequences of activities and interactions.
Narrative is seen to play a key role in the process of entextualising the self and the
performance of identity (or (dis)identification (Leppnen et al., 2014), since it
constitutes not just a vehicle of representation of denotational content but also a
means for positioning narrator and audience interactionally (Wortham, 2000, p. 166,
cited in Georgakopoulou, 2007). Bamberg (1997) outlines the three interrelated
positioning levels as follows8:
Positioning Level 1: the representation of characters (e.g. descriptions, evaluations) and event
sequences; how are the characters positioned to one another within the storyworld?
Positioning Level 2: the interactional uses and rhetorical functions that the aspects of the
story construction serve; how does the speaker position him/herself to the audience?
Positioning Level 3: the establishment of a sense of self; how do narrators position
themselves to themselves?

The aforedescribed levels of positioning are apt for the study of entextualised
moments of life and death shared with and for networked mourners on Facebook.
Identifying different types of positioning can point to how posters use narrative to
enact affective stances towards the death-related events and the dead, the
networked audience and their own selves and by doing so, construct identification
(or disidentification) and social relations with others. The next section presents the
data selected for analysis and the research questions to be addressed in this article.
3. Data

The analysis presented in the following sections is part of a wider discoursecentred project on online death-related practices. The focus, here, is on the close
analysis of selected moments shared on a Facebook R.I.P. site created to pay
tribute to the sudden passing of a young adult in May 2012 in a car crash in a state
of Georgia, US. The open group site accommodates over than 1,000 members,
including people who knew the deceased and people who had never met him in
person9 but were affected by his death.
The specific site was selected out of a corpus of 25 R.I.P. open group sites and
pages from the US, UK and Greece sampled by browsing on Facebook using the
Search function. The criteria used for the selection of the site for close study
included participants age, evidence of regular and ongoing posting activity on the

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K. Giaxoglou

site, and evidence of offline links between group members. The selected online
social network memorial was set up by close friends of the deceased, who were
his schoolmates, also attending the same local Baptist church. The online
memorial is one among a range of forms of mourning and memorialising the
young adult, who is to be referred throughout the article as David.10 For instance,
his classmates wore his favourite sports team colours for a week, included
coloured tassels on their caps at the school graduation ceremony and put on
memorial hand-made bracelets that were circulated at school and in the local
church community. The Facebook R.I.P. group, thus, forms an extension of offline
mourning practices providing mourners with an informal site for grieving and
memorialising notes shared in the form of a public diary (Giaxoglou, 2014a) and
contributing to the generation of a multi-voiced wall of tributes for public display
(Giaxoglou, 2014b).
At the time of writing this paper, the group site numbered 525 logs of a total
29,136 words ranging from 2 words minimum to 281 words maximum. The group
site is regularly updated to this day. Out of the 1,265 group members listed on the
site, 198 can be considered as active participants, having logged at least one post
until the present day with 24 members among them as most active, having logged
more than 5 posts from the day of the sites creation (Giaxoglou, 2014a). The
discourse style of R.I.P. posts emerging on the site involves an observed tendency
to open messages either by the use of direct addresses to the dead or the use of the
first and second personal pronouns invoking genres of personal writing and diary
writing. In addition, R.I.P. authors show a preference for some form of closing,
most commonly featuring the expressions R.I.P. (predominantly in messages by
male posters), Fly High (predominantly in messages by female posters) or
expressive formulae in conventional or personalised forms (e.g. you are missed,
missing you, love you) (Giaxoglou, 2014b). Formulaic closings invoke the
genre of short epitaphs on headstones and contribute to the creation of a solemn
style appropriate to the subject matter of death and mourning. Participants tend to
blend such solemn, conventional types of expressions of sadness with more
informal and personalised expressions of grief and mourning, which are closer to
SNS styles of interaction.
For the purposes of analysis, the publicly shared content was saved in a doc file
and inputted into excel spreadsheets coding individual logs for content threads,
post sequences within content threads, and wall events. The discussion will focus
on the posts of a female participant who has broadcasted eight updates in total
covering a period of six months (MayOctober 2012). Table 1 presents all the
posts published under her personal profile name, including the date of publication,
its position in the sequence of posts making up the wall (where messages are
organised from the bottom up and viewed in reverse chronological order), the type
of content thread it makes part of and the total number of lines it counts. For the
purposes of the present analysis, only text-based posts published on the day of the
sites creation have been considered and more specifically the first two moments,
posted on the date of the sites creation and the last one posted six months later
(moments appear in bold on Table 1). The three posts cover the maximum and
minimum length of posts shared by the author across the corpus.

Entextualising mourning on Facebook

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Table 1. Data outline.

Moment no

Date of post

Sequence no

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

May 10
May 10
May 11
May 12
May 13
June 18
June 26
October 10

18
26
50
97
134
248
278
348

Content thread

Word count

Death reactions
Death reactions
Death reactions
Funeral services
Funeral services
General
General
General

134
18
Picture
75
Picture
58
50
112

Based on the narrative and positioning analysis of the selected three posts as
entextualised moments of life and death, the following research questions will be
addressed:
(1) What kind of stories do networked mourners tell on Facebook SNS memorials
sites?
(2) How are digital stories used as an interactional and entextualisation resource
for enacting positionings at the three interrelated levels of storyworld,
audience and self?
4. Analysis
4.1. Shared moments of online grief as stories

In this section the selected moments for analysis will be considered in terms of the
way events and characters are narratively represented providing remarks about the
formal aspects of the stories told in the context of online memorial sites and
addressing the first positioning level, i.e. the level of the storyworld.
The first moment reports the death of David in a rather lengthy post of 134
words, framed by a textual adverbial (first of all) as its atypical opening (instead
of the preferred option for a direct address or the use of a personal pronoun, see
Section 3). The message closes with a formulaic expression (fly high sweet
boy), typical of the discourse style preferred by female posters on the group site.
Moment 111
1 First of all,
2 I should NOT be writing this about you.
3 You should be here with us, making us laugh & putting huge smiles on our faces.
4 As selfish as that makes me sound,
5 Im happy
6 youve finally made it home safely & pain free
7 as perfect as we thought

K. Giaxoglou
8 you were on earth,
9 youre 1,000 times more perfect now
10 than you ever were.
11 God had you here to show us
12 what love really is
13 & the true meaning of what he is.

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14 Last night at 10:18, we lost the most special angel ever given to us,
15 & God gained one.
16 Even though Im a georgia girl,
17 Im gonna be wearin that blue & orange
18 like its goin outa style.
19 Ill be talking to you EVERY night in my prayers.
20 Fly high sweet boy. (Facebook Memorial Group Wall post, No. 18, May 10, accessed 18
May 2014, 135 words)

In terms of narrative structure (see Table 2), Moment 1 is organised around the
report of one main event, namely the loss of David, which is reported in line 7 in
two narrative clauses characterised by two main verbs in the past tense (lost;
gained). The two clauses are sequentially ordered and separated by a temporal
juncture (last night at 10:18). The telling of the main event is preceded by
evaluation clauses, in which the author provides her point of view on the events
and guides the audience as to the significance and tellability (or point) of the
Table 2. Narrative units in Moment 1.
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

First of all
I should NOT be writing this about you
You should be here with us making us laugh & putting
huge smiles on our faces
As selfish as that makes me sound Im happy youve
finally made it home safely & pain free [heart emoticon]
as perfect as we thought you were on earth youre 1,000
times more perfect now than you ever were.
God had you here to show us what love really is & the
true meaning of what he is.
Last night at 10:18 we lost the most special angel ever
given to us & God gained one
Even though Im a Georgia girl, Im gonna be wearin
that blue & orange like its going outa style Illbe talking
to you EVERY night in my prayers.
Fly high sweet boy [heart emoticon]

Structural unit
R.I.P. post opening
Evaluation A
Evaluation B
Evaluation C
Evaluation D
Evaluation E
Complicating action
Coda
R.I.P. post closing

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Entextualising mourning on Facebook

story. The post concludes with a coda section bridging back to the present
moment of telling by referring to how the mourner will be striving to keep David
alive in her everyday life (l. 8).
The evaluative clauses around which the report of the main event of death is
constructed feature the tellers commentary on the implausibility of the death (l. 2:
I should NOT be writing this about you) contrasted with the proposition of
alternative, desirable realities (l. 3: you should be here with us, making us laugh &
putting huge smiles on our faces). The user also expresses her personal, positive
emotional stance to the death (l.5-6: Im happy youve finally made it home safely &
pain free), while at the same time seeking to discount potential negative judgements
of this type of expressed positivity (l. 4: as selfish as that makes me sound). Finally,
the post includes an appraisal of the story characters weaved in the telling, namely
the deceased who is described in terms of his positive attributes (l.5: as perfect as
we thought you were on earth, youre 1,000 times more perfect now than you ever
were) and God who is represented as the well-meaning agent of both life and death
(l.6: God had you here to show us what love really is & the true meaning of what he
is). In the coda section, the author expresses her commitment to commemorate and
remember David all the time, projecting a promise of continuing bonds with the
deceased (l. 8: Im gonna be wearin that blue & orange like its going outa style, Ill
be talking to you EVERY night in my prayers).
Moment 1 can be best described as a minimal narrative, i.e. a sequence of
two clauses which are temporally ordered (Labov, 1972, pp. 360361) in and
through which the event of death is represented as a fact that needs to be made
sense of.
Let us now turn to the second moment posted later on the same day. The post is
much shorter, counting 19 words in total. Featuring a question as an opener (l.1),
the post markedly departs from the typical opening of R.I.P. posts (see Section 3).
Moment 2
1 Can I please just wake up from this nightmare now?
2 theres only so many tears
3 I can handle. (Facebook Memorial Group Wall post, No. 26, May 10, accessed 18 May
2014, 19 words)

Moment 2 is articulated in the first person, placing the self at centre stage, while
no other story characters are being explicitly introduced or referred to. The author
is sharing a piece of raw experience of heightened emotionality and projecting
her feeling state as the news of Davids death is sinking in. The post can be seen
as a fragment of mourning or an allusion to grief. In that respect, it is seemingly a
small story, an attempted foray into lamenting that does not develop into a
minimal or fully fledged narrative or even into a full performance of mourning.
Finally, the third moment posted six months after the aforediscussed posts
features a more developed style compared to Moments 1 and 2. It is framed by a
direct address as its opening and an expression of personal feelings as its closing,
both typical of the discourse structure of RIP posts on the site (see Section 3).

10

K. Giaxoglou
Moment 3
1 Hey babyyy.
2 Today, we were on the mats at cheerleading
3 & we were talking about our competition Saturday.
4 When you enter the competition mat,
5 youre not allowed to wear ANY jewelry.

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6 So mrs armstrong says

7 Im sorry to say it,
8 but the Davey bracelets have to come off
9 while youre competing
10 all of us got this oh no, that aint happenin look on our face.
11 When we wear our davy bracelets,
12 everything goes right.
13 Its safe the say
14 that the harlem high cheerleaders have their own guardian angel.
15 So please just keep workin your magic
16 as we take the floor during our competition Saturday!
17 I love
18 & miss you more than ever. (Facebook Memorial Group Wall post, No. 348, October 10,
accessed 18 May 2014, 112 words)

In terms of narrative structure (see Table 3), a more fully developed narrative form
is noticeable in Moment 3 (see Table 3). The author relates a story from her
cheerleading team, which features the typical progression from a clearly set
temporal and spatial setting (l. 2 today we were on the mat at cheerleading) and
additional background material about the conditions of the competition that are
relevant to the unfolding of the story to the complicating action, set off by the
teachers request to the cheerleaders to remove their bracelets (l.3). The complicating action is resolved with the cheerleader members showing resistance to the
teachers request (l.4). The storys tellability is established by the two evaluative
clauses explaining the point of the story (l.5 and l. 6), which can be summed as in
that the memorial bracelets are not to be removed. The expressed reluctance to
remove them constructs them as signs of honour, commemoration as well as
keepsakes of good luck for those who wear them. The post concludes with a coda
section that bridges over to the present moment of writing the post, representing
David as a magic agent who can provide support to the cheerleaders when they
will be competing (l.7).
The aforementioned description of narrative form in the post featured all
sections of a fully fledged story as put forward by Labov (see Section 2.1). The

Entextualising mourning on Facebook

11

Table 3. Narrative units in Moment 3.

Text
1
2

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3
4
5
6
7
8

Hey babyyy
Today we were on the mat at cheerleading & we were talking
about our competition Saturday. When you enter the
competition mat, youre not allowed to wear ANY jewelry.
So, Mrs X says Im sorry to say it, but the davy bracelets
have to come off while youre competing
All of us got this oh no that aint happening look on our face.
When we wear our davy bracelets, everything goes right.
Its safe the [sic] say that the X high cheerleaders have their
own guardian angel
So please keep workin your magic as we take the floor during
our competition Saturday!
I love & miss you more than ever (heart emoticon)

Structural unit
R.I.P. post-opening
Orientation
Complicating action
Resolution
Evaluation 1
Evaluation 2
Coda
R.I.P. post-closing

post also features markers of performance or involvement devices (Bauman,

1986; Tannen, 1984), such as quoted speech (Mrs X says Im sorry to say it, but
the davy bracelets have to come off while youre competing), imagery (All of us
got this oh no that aint happening look on our face) and use of punctuation
marks signalling some form of heightened involvement (e.g. exclamation mark,
capitalisation of ANY, use of emoticon), hence foregrounding its nature as a
narrative performed for an audience.
The analysis of the three selected moments illustrates a continuum of emergent
narrative structure in R.I.P. posts featuring diverse ways of telling, which range
from the minimal (Moment 1) to the small (Moment 2) and the big (Moment 3).
The representation of the event of death does not remain the same across the three
posts, but rather is encoded differently in each moment. In Moment 1 the event of
death is represented as fact to be accepted, in Moment 2 as painful experience
(Moment 2), and in Moment 3 as commitment to remember. The dead is
represented variously as an indefectible person or an angel (Moment 1), a friend
whose loss has caused distress (Moment 2) or as a magical agent watching the
living from above and participating in their activities (Moment 3). In all three
messages, the dead is constructed more or less explicitly as a person of positive
attributes worthy of being mourned, commemorated and remembered. And yet, in
each post the author draws on narrative resources differently, constructing
different types of alignments to the dead and the networked audience. The
analysis in the following section will focus on the second level of positioning
(see Section 2.1), that will help to shed light to why the author varies her
entextualisations across posts.
4.2. Stories of grief online as positioning resources

Stories as acts of sharing serve to reaffirm viewpoints on the events represented

and foreground affiliation (or disaffiliation) with others; stories are not just reports

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12

K. Giaxoglou

of experience used to document and reflect on past events. Authors of R.I.P. posts
index (dis)affiliation via event and character representation as well as via the
framing of their messages in terms of openings and closings. For instance, the
preference of opening the message by a direct address to the dead using his first
name or the use of a short epitaph (R.I.P) followed by a form of address (e.g.
R.I.P. man, R.I.P. bro) can be seen to signal the authors affiliation with the dead,
affording her entitlement rights for entextualising a moment of mourning for
sharing on the site. Furthermore, such framing constructs the dead as the main
addressee of the message and the networked public as the silent reader or the
sympathetic listener.
Regarding the three moments under focus, in the minimal narrative report of
death featured (Moment 1), the author is seen to signal her alignment with the
networked mourners by using the plural form of the first personal pronoun (we).
Through the use of we, she weaves the bereaved in the emerging storyworld
and situates them in the here space of the living as separate from the dead.12 At
the same time, the ample use of evaluation in her story allows her to foreground
explicitly its point or why it is tellable for her audience. And yet, the use of the
direct address to the deceased by using the second personal pronoun (you) (l.2)
and the choice of term of address in the closing (l.20 sweet boy)13 constructs
the dead as the main addressee in the form of an absent co-present. The post does
not invite interaction with members of the group, constructing thus the networked
audience as sympathetic listeners.
The small story featured in Moment 2 illustrates a different type of alignment to
the networked public. Its lack of any kind of explicit opening or closing signals
the authors proximity to networked mourners as well as a shared frame of
reference in terms of tellability. The small story of grief functions as an initiative
post in a sequentially implicative way that foregrounds storytelling as an
interactional activity drawing in other participants (see Sequence 1).
Sequence 1
Initiative post:
A.14 Can I please just wake up from this nightmare now? [emoticon of sad face] theres only
so many tears I can handle
[21 People Like This]
Comments
A1. This is crazy...I went to sleep crying last night & woke up crying this morning. Ive been
trying to be strong, but Im at my breaking point..(4:39am)
B2. agreed! & tomorrows gonna be my first day at school without him, so its gonna be a
HARDDDD day for meee</3 (4:40am)
A3. its gonna be mine too. I didnt go to school. I woulda been on my hands & knees bawlin
like a baby in the middle of the hallway.
B4. me toooo! i might do that tomorrow /: we can do it together!

Entextualising mourning on Facebook

13

C5. Dont cry [emoticon of sad face].. I know its hard. And I know its seems like me saying
dont cry now, is like saying Mr tree, dont let your leaves blow in the wind. We all miss
him. And we all wanna cry. And im sure you will keep crying. But im just trying to make
people feel a little better..
A6: would definitely not want us crying right now, bc we all know that kid is partyin hard
with jesus. I just gotta get used to this. & plus, were girls. You cant tell a girl to stop crying
& expect her to stop.. we dont run that way haha.
C7: I knowww. I understand though. I hope you guys feel better someday.

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A8: Well thank you for trying to make us feel better! Not gonna lie, its working.
C9: That makes me very happy. And Im glad. c: im always here if you ever need someone to
talk to. C:

In Moment 2, the author is explicitly orienting herself to the networked audience

as the main recipient of her message. The post receives 21 responses in the form
of Likes, which signal the networked friends active listenership and nods of
acknowledgement of grief or support. Two networked friends also add comments
to the post acknowledging the writers state, exchanging support resources (Baym,
2010) and reorienting the emerging negative stance of the shared moment towards
a more positive tone (e.g. C5 dont cry; I hope you guys feel better someday).
In Moment 3, however, the author shifts back to aligning herself towards the
dead, constructing him explicitly as the main addressee of her message. The story
fragment opens with a greeting followed by a form of address (l1. hey babyyy)
and closes with an expressive statement (l.18 I love & miss you more than ever),
simulating a dialogue with the dead as an imagined interactant. Uses of the first
person plural we referring to members of the cheerleading group weave them
into the telling as story characters. Networked mourners are not constructed as the
direct recipients of the message, but seem to be considered as eavesdroppers on
the authors imaginary interaction with the dead. The assumption that others will
be reading the tribute posts on the site affords networked individuals with
opportunities for bonding with others around locally negotiated symbols and
meanings without the requirement of direct interaction, online or offline. This type
of affiliation with others online creates what Zappavigna (2011) has referred to as
ambient affiliation, a type of affinity based on common concerns and alignments
that help construct social relations online, encompassing people who know each
other as well as people who have never met.
To sum up, changes in the form of the posts entail changes in the authors
positioning to the audience, be it the dead or the networked mourners. In posts
closer to the date of the sites creation, orientation to the networked mourners
tends to be more explicit, either by establishing the storys tellability via
evaluative clauses (Moment 1) or by directly involving them, seeking their
support (Moment 2). Six months after the creation of the site and approximately
300 posts broadcast in-between, the author can assume shared ground with
networked mourners regarding tellability or involvement and omit explicit cues of
positioning to them. As illustrated in Moment 3, later posts tend to construct the
dead as the main addressee of the post and align to the networked mourners as
silent readers or sympathetic listeners.

14

K. Giaxoglou

The next section will conclude the present analysis by focusing on how the
author positions herself to her self, allowing some remarks on the ideological
orientation within which she establishes a sense of her grieving self in the context
of the memorial site.

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4.3 Self-presentation in entextualised moments of mourning online

The authors trajectory of entextualised moments of mourning indexes not only

different types of positionings to the dead and the networked audience but also
different types of self-presentation, which are linked to the authors projected
affective stance, that is the expression of personal feelings, attitudes or
judgements towards a stance object (Barton & Lee, 2013).
In Moment 1 the author presents her emotional self as happy (l.5 Im happy
youve finally made it home safely & pain free) and performs a commissive
speech act by which she promises publicly to remember her deceased friend (l.17
Im gonna be wearin that blue & orange like its goin outa style) and continue to
be in touch with him everyday (l.19 Ill be talking to you EVERY night in my
prayers). The expressed affective stance indexes a positive emotional self in line
with conventional performatives of mourning enacted within Christian communities in the United States.15
In contrast to Moment 1, Moment 2 displays the authors emotional self as
struggling to cope, living a nightmare and crying. The focus on the here-and-now
of the authors lived experience and the staging of the self at the centre of the post
denotes a negative affective stance. The choice of fragmentary narrative form and
the authors orientation to the networked mourners contribute to her construction
as an authentic sufferer seeking visibility in others recognition, sympathy and
support. The comments that respond to the authors emotional appeal, in particular
those volunteered by friend C, provide verbal recognition of the authors emotion wants, needs and desires (C5: and we all wanna cry; and im sure you will
keep crying) and at the same time call for a need to manage and restrict them
(C5: dont cry). The respondent is seen to attempt the reorientation of the author
and by extension the networked audienceback to emotional optimism (C5:
But im just trying to make people feel a little better), which is accepted by the
poster (A8: Not gonna lie, its working). This wall event, thus, presents one
example of viewing crying as understandable in the context of loss and at the
same time as a state that one should control and overcome towards feeling
better.
Moment 3 features a shift in the authors display of affective stance as she
moves away from the direct staging of emotional states to the weaving of her
affective stance in the story. Referring to the reaction of the cheerleaders group
including herself to the request to remove the memorial bracelets, she uses
direct speech as a resource for building in an internal evaluation to her story (all
of us got this oh no, that aint happening look on our face). Furthermore, she is
also seen to project feelings of grief to the group of cheerleaders she is a member
of, thereby distancing herself from the centre stage of suffering. The weaving of
the authors affective stance to the structure of her story and the story characters
arguably creates a forum for reinserting mourning and grief to the realm of the

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Entextualising mourning on Facebook

15

everyday and allows the author to project herself as a part of a group of mourners
committed to hold on the memory of the dead aided by shared symbols of
remembrance, rather than mourn alone.
The authors positioning to her self, then, is also found to shift in her different
posts. Drawing variously on narrative resources and positionings, the author is
seen to develop across her posts the construction of her emotional self from a
conventional mourner in control of her grief (Moment 1), to a grieving subject
(Moment 2) to a member of a peer group of mourners self-distancing from painful
grieving (Moment 3). The next section will provide some concluding remarks and
suggestions for further study.

5. Conclusion

The present article sets out to investigate the kinds of stories that mourners tell on
Facebook memorial sites and the kinds of interactional and discourse functions
they use them for. Focusing on a selection of wall events shared by a single author
across a period of six months on a site created by US young adults of Baptist
Christian faith, digital stories of grief were found to document the tragic event of
loss (Moment 1), to record individual reactions and heightened states of
emotionality (Moment 2) or to transform individual loss into a group concern,
by weaving grief in everyday activities (Moment 3). In terms of narrative form,
they seemingly resemble the Facebook status updates studied by Page (2012) in
their smallness and story-like fragmentary shape; and yet they are also seen to
differ markedly from Facebook status updates in the clustering of their narrative
dimensions towards the polished end of the narrativity continuum (Ochs & Capps,
2001), typically involving one teller and reporting events whose tellability is more
or less shared and guaranteed. In terms of their functions, sharing stories on the
Facebook tribute wall appear similar to the sharing of status updates, which
according to Page (p.85) enables the updater to project social connection with
others [] within a system of exchange, where appropriate language use enables
the updater to gain social capital. In SNS environments for mourning, sharing
stories of grief online constitutes a resource for communicating the experience of
loss according to the expectations of the audience and to the best interests of the
teller, i.e. increasing their social visibility and acceptability.
The analytical remarks offered in the present article echo previous findings in
the relevant literature, which have foregrounded the function of online spaces of
mourning as a therapeutic resource for individual mourners (Worden, 2009, cited
in Pawelczyk, 2013) as well as a supportive online community of and for the
bereaved (Walter et al., 2011) where users share memories addressing directly the
deceased (Brubaker et al., 2013; Dobler, 2009). However, the present discussion
complicates previous findings by pointing to how significant moments of
mourning get entextualised via a range of narrative forms, affording opportunities
for tellers to position themselves to the represented events, the dead, the
networked bereaved and their emotional self differently, depending on the place
of the post in the sequence of wall events and the desired affective stance to be
projected.

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16

K. Giaxoglou

Different types of identified positionings to the audience can be arguably used

as resources for (1) claiming entitlement in sharing moments of mourning, (2)
calling for or exchanging support resources or (3) discursively constructing a
shared spatio-temporal space for interacting with the dead. Different types of
identified positionings to the represented events and the emotional self can be
used as resources for projecting negative or positive affective stances and
exploring ones involvement in or distantiation from the painful process of
grieving.
On a more general level, telling stories are to be seen as acts of sharing serving
as resources for making meaning out of the meaninglessness of loss and help
render the painful experience of mourning in tellable and replicable forms.
Sharing moments of mourning online can create opportunities for the production
of speech in a holding environment (Balick, 2013) in which participants can
interact with the dead, potentially helping them cope with their loss. At the same
time, and perhaps more importantly so, digital storytelling as an act of sharing
contributes to the creation of a sense of affinity or ambient affiliation with the
networked bereaved without the need of direct interaction, allowing the
customisation of the work of mourning to ones time, space and emotional needs.
Further narrative analysis research on memorial sites created and maintained by
different communities of practice would shed further light to the forms and uses
of digital stories of grief in context. In addition, it would be worth focusing on
histories of telling, including the study of stories of grief shared offline as well as
online and also consider users reflections on their practices of entextualising and
sharing as a way of elucidating death-related discourse and sociality in relation to
the construction of the affective self in contemporary techno-social contexts.
Notes
[1] Based on Facebook Statistics (June 2014), the platform engages 829 million daily active users
on average, 81.7% of whom are outside the US and Canada (Facebook Company Info, 2014).
[2] Recent publications on social media in the field of sociolinguistics include a student guide on
research methods on language and social media by Ruth Page, David Barton, Johann Unger
and Michele Zappavigna (2014), a collection of papers on identity and community, edited by
Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (2014), a collection of papers drawn from the 2011
Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) edited by
Deborah Tannen and Anne-Marie Trester (2013), and an introduction to digital media literacies
co-authored by Rodney Jones and Christopher Hafner (2012) not to mention the numerous
articles, special issues both published and forthcoming by various authors.
[3] For an overview of literature on the topic, see Walter et al. (2011).
[4] Abstract refers to what the story is about, Orientation provides the background to the story in
terms of time, place and main characters, Complicating Action is the core narrative action
providing the what happened next or main event element of the story, Resolution includes
what happened finally and Coda signals the end of the story and marks the return to the time of
telling. Evaluation is the section which encodes the tellers attitudes, stances and feelings to the
reported events (Labov, 1972, 1997, 2004).
[5] Tellership refers to whether there is one or more tellers, Tellability refers to the extent to which
an account is considered to be worth telling, Embeddedness refers to whether and a how a
story is embedded in other contexts (e.g. as part of a conversation), Linearity refers to whether

Entextualising mourning on Facebook

[6]

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[7]

[8]
[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]
[13]

[14]
[15]

17

and how events are temporally and causally ordered and finally, Moral stance refers to the
tellers (and characters) stances to the telling.
Temporal juncture between two independent clauses is considered to be a defining feature of
narrative structure and is said to exist between two narrative clauses when a change in the
order of the clauses produces a change in the interpretation of the order of the referenced
events in past time (for an overview and appraisal of Labov and Waletzys model of narrative,
see De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, pp. 2636).
According to John (2013, pp. 170171) the notion of sharing in SNSs metaphorically draws on
understandings of sharing that are prevalent in Western, urban, middle-class therapeutic culture
characterised by the spread of psychological principles into personal relationships and
encouraging us to share all needs and feelings.
See also Georgakopoulou (2007, p. 124).
It is worth noting that across the site, group members who were not friends or acquaintances of
the deceased tend to make that explicit at the start of their post and explain why they are
writing on the site (e.g. reports of how much they wish they had met him or how much they
have inspired by his impact on others lives abound in such posts).
All names used in the article are pseudonyms in an attempt to protect the anonymity of the
deceased and group members. Also, specific references to location or other references to
individuals personal information have been omitted for reasons of ethics. The analysis has been
conducted with a deep sense of respect for the deceased young adult, his family and friends.
Note on transcription: The transcription of moments from the Facebook site is based on the
unit of line defined as a clause including a finite verb. Note that openings and closings have
been marked as separate lines due to their role in the discourse organisation of the post.
Orthography is retained and no amendments have been made to the text with the exception of
replacing real names with pseudonyms and omitting references to places and other named
individuals.
According to Baptist beliefs, when Christians die, their bodies are buried but their spirits (or
souls) are immediately ushered into the presence of the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8).
Furthermore, the expression of her commitment in the coda section to commemorate and
remember him all the time (Im gonna be wearin that blue & orange like its going outa style,
Ill be talking to you EVERY night in my prayers) can be interpreted as an injunction to
networked mourners to do the same.
Letters A, B and C represent different participants in the interaction.
Julian Barnes (2013, p. 107) remarks that in the US emotional optimism is a constitutional duty.

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