thoughts on mourning on social media in slate:

“Social media may make it easier to launch a stream of frown-y faces into the ether, but Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent the impulse to reach out when you’re hurting. Perhaps it’s the ephemerality of online mourning that trivializes it—the word limits mocking death’s enormity…Social media platforms favor a tone of snark and irony, not earnestness, which can make plaintive expressions of grief hard to parse. And since we use Twitter and Facebook in part to create a public persona, our posts always run the risk of appearing self-promotional, inauthentic: It’s never quite clear whether someone is actually upset about the latest Hollywood overdose or just trying to seem that way. Of course, this makes our online interactions pretty much the same as our offline ones: a stream of true and false statements mixed together, adding up to a social self that is sort of us and sort of not.”