What Grief isn’t: Dead Grief Concepts and Their Digital-Age Revival

Abstract

We used to think grief was about moving through a set of prescribed stages, a process after which we would be ‘over it’ and resume normality. However, this view has been dismissed, and the deleterious effects of such universal, linear, and reductive grief accounts are well established. Multi-disciplinary theory and research suggest there’s no right, one or healthy way to grieve; no stages, steps, or prescriptions. Rather, grief involves survivors telling stories of their dead, their relationship to them, and themselves, in relationships with others doing the same, these stories shaped by societies and cultures. Within these shifting parameters, our stories of our dead are interpretive, creative, and active, and our griefs are as idiosyncratic and diverse as the relationships to which they pertain. However, with the digitalisation of life over the last two decades, old ideas about grief have crept back in. In this chapter, we show how,  at the intersection of grief and the digital, three long-debunked notions about grief are reviving: (i) that there’s a normal way to grieve, (ii) that technology helps or hinders grief, and (iii) that we must control technology’s impact on the bereaved. We use longitudinal, qualitative data to problematise the digital-age reanimation of these dead grief concepts, and to illustrate their continued inappropriateness for contemporary grievers.