Humanity will always reinvent ways we treat the dead. Just like any other aspect of our lives, we’re taking our grief to the digital.
The question whether this is a good or a bad thing is obsolete as it’s already happening around us. We should be asking more pertinent questions—how does this medium of grief affect us? How do we move forward with it? What are the consequences of doing so? How does this intersect with the existing issues in our community?
We’re moving into an uncharted territory. The digital has affected us in many ways we weren’t prepared for. Information travels too fast from what we were used to. People have lost sense on what is a healthy consumption of information anymore. Negative and false information are found to spread at a faster speed than positive ones. Can we keep up with it? Can our brains evolve to keep up with all of it?
We should learn our lesson and be more prepared for what else is to come with this technology.
Grief is a traumatic experience that needs to be processed with care. It takes time and patience to thread through one’s grief. With the way grief travels through the digital today, do we have the resources and capacity to do so? Can we even afford the time to do so under cruel capitalistic system that demands us to break our backs to work like cogs in a machine while our friends and families are at risk of dying, losing jobs, and losing homes? The more vulnerable someone is, the more pressure they have to endure.
Mental health resources had always been scarce and inaccessible to begin with. With hundreds of thousands people dying in such short span of time, grief became a common everyday occurance. We’ve become desensitized to it. One person’s death is just another number to add to the statistics. But is that really how we want to treat each other?
We can’t afford to have a humanity that doesn’t grief for we can’t afford to have a humanity that doesn’t acknowledge itself.
We need proper spaces for grief. With our limited physical mobility, we have to work with what is available to us. The need of online grieving spaces seems greater than the risks. However, as I’ve stressed many times before throughout this document, grief and death technology should be explored with caution and mindfulness.
This research is only the beginning of my journey to create spaces and tools for grieving for our community. While the main purpose of this pdf is to document my research process and thought, I hope it could help others understand the importance of this topic and invite more people to critically engage with the issues and possibilities that come with it.