MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Can Facebook’s digital graveyard form communities “offline”? Cyber-memorialization allows the griever to maintain a personal, albeit public, connection with the deceased. This is a subject that online media scholars are examining both at the individual level and in relation to community-wide tragedies that, in the past, might have been mourned separately or privately after the initial shock has passed. In this presentation, I focus on Facebook as a sphere of interaction that allows members of a community to collectively cope with grief. It is a space where they can form, and re-form, memories of the deceased. My research was inspired by a 2011 incident in southern New Jersey. August 20th, 2011, a SUV occupied by eight high school football players overturned several times on the Garden State Parkway. Four teenagers died. The teenagers went to a high school that incorporated three separate suburbs into one school district. Outside school, students socialized within their own suburb.

The day of the accident, a community member created the “R.I.P. Mainland HS Boys. Gone but never forgotten,” Facebook page. Within three hours, four thousand people liked the page. By the end of the day, 7,000. Almost four years later, 39,000 people like the page. The page moderator posted updates on funerals and memorial events, and community members replied with prayers and condolences about the accident.

The memorialization began online, with friends and family posting on the walls’ of the deceased and spread regionally through a community Facebook page. Coming together online led to in-person memorial events, from a candlelight vigil to a memorial fund to a corporate sponsorship competition. “One family, one love, one community,” became the regional motto. Thus, the online community seeped into reality, changing the discourse on how local residents defined their regional community.