Social Mourning from"Strangers":Digital Mourning and Continuous Bonds with Chinese Characteristics
Nowadays,digital mourning has become a unique way of media memory.When some individ-ual lives are gone,tens of thousands of"strangers"mourn on social media,forming a special bond.This study takes the deceased of"celebrities"and"ordinary celebrities"as cases,and explores the gen-eration mechanism,significance and contemporary value of strangers'digital mourning of the deceased public figures from the perspective of the theory of Continuing Bonds,focusing on the characteristics of the continuing bonds in the Chinese context.The study finds that mourners establish bonds based on five motives:information compensation,spiritual imagination,emotional tree-hole,fixed rituals,and memory writing,through which they renegotiate the deceased's identity in order to extend the deceased's personality and obtain guidance for their lives;the public and social nature of connections strength-ens the group experience,allowing mourners to enjoy the sense of intimacy and trust brought by the community,and to fight against forgetfulness through rituals,which in turn facilitates the discussion of public issues.The continuing bonds in the Chinese context are characterized by a particular temporal rhythm,and its expression of mourning has a tendency towards pragmatism.The bonds with Chinese characteristics originate from the post life world belief model of"death is like life",as well as the"eternal"imagination provided by digital technology.These bonds are beneficial for individuals to cope with the sense of loss and confusion caused by the phenomenon of death.It is a way of emotional reso-nance in the digital age and also provides a possibility for social trust reconstruction.
digital mourningpublic figurescontinuing bondsdigital deathcollective memory
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
