Unshareable: Non-Sharing Grief and Grievabilities on Social Media

For death-online scholars, online rituals of loss and death help to challenge and reinforce social and moral order. The digital mediates, remediates and ‘mediatises’ both life and death. While grieving is an individual, internal process, mourning is an external practice that can help to connect us with others. Mourning is culturally specific. It is collective. Through posting eulogies online and sharing experiences of loss, we can enhance our grief literacy through grief vernaculars. The role of the digital in connecting us to informal processes of mourning and memorialisation is vast. However, what about the people who choose not to share online? Who decides not to post their tributes, eulogies and memories online? This article seeks to explore this under-researched phenomenon. Much like ‘non-use’, unshareability and non-sharing are crucial parts of contemporary digital culture. In this article, we investigate experiences of unshareability. Drawing from over 57 interviews with participants dealing with all types of loss and grief, we focus on examples of seven participants who spoke about the complications with sharing and choices not to share. We explore those tensions and how this reflects grievabilities – who is digitally mournable and who is not.