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The answer to the question posed
in the title of this video is yes.
Yes, it is OK to mourn celebrity death online.
And yes, it's OK to do each component activity.
It's OK to mourn online.
It's OK to mourn celebrities.
We're going to talk about why, but also
the reasons some people think those things are not OK.
In the wake of recent high profile
deaths like David Bowie, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Nelson
Mandela, Alan Rickman, and the victims of senseless violence
like those at Sandy Hook, in San Bernardino, or Norway,
we see an outpouring of grief and mourning online.
From people close to the deceased and from those by all
accounts not.
Communicating with friends and family members
and about our feelings and current events via social media
is increasingly a part of day to day life
in this part of the world.
And as much as we may avoid it, death
is similarly a part of day to day life.
So alongside a growing desire and capability
to communicate online about culture, politics, and art,
there's a growing desire and capability to mourn,
not just for those physically and interpersonally close to us
but for those whom we feel close given their presence
in culture, politics and art.
But for many people, adopting social media into the mourning
process at all is anathema.
Most famously derided is the funeral selfie,
a much-maligned flash in the pan social media backlash
trend which saw grown adults uncritically judging teenagers
for their admittedly somewhat awkward missteps in navigating
a difficult situation.
"Huff Post" said funeral selfies are the latest evidence
the apocalypse can't come soon enough,
and "Business Insider" described the narcissistic impulse
to take and post a gratuitous photo.
I can only hope that since posting them
these authors have grown embarrassed,
because as Katy Waldman for "Slate" and Caitlin
Doughty for "Jezebel" point out, the funeral selfie is
not or not primarily an effect of narcissism or poor judgment.
It's an effect of daily normal habit colliding
with what Doughty calls our tragic disengagement
with the reality of death.
She writes of teenagers, "our cultural traditions
have failed them, and selfies at funerals
are one of their only outlets to ritual and mourning
in the age of the smartphone."
To judge teenagers who mourn using social media
is to judge a culture which has disengaged
from the larger conversation about death and dying.
Whatever apocalypse Huff Po fears
is signaled not by teens dealing clumsily with tragedy
but by a world that would sooner judge than converse with them,
perhaps as a result of its own inability to confront death.
As Western culture has become more secular, and as Doughty
again points out, after the rise of the death and funeral
industry we have less opportunity
to directly and practically confront
mortality and fewer traditions which
guide us through the process of grieving.
Even Sigmund Freud held what would
become the popular Western notion about grief, that it
is a deeply personal process.
Extrapolated from this notion our beliefs
that grief is private, a sign of weakness, something one
must get through, something separate
and which should never collide with our day
to day lives out of respect and deference.
This is a position held by many people,
and it seems everyone who laments
the mourning of both celebrities and close friends online.
Online mourning, Dylan Byers at "Politico" writes,
"makes death feel cheap.
One minute someone is posting about the dinner
they had last night or the YouTube video they
just watched, the next minute they're writing something
like wow or heartbroken," as if it's impossible to have
several emotions at one time.
Writer Zadie Smith in the "New York Review of Books"
chalks the desire for teens to commemorate a loved one
on Facebook using acronym-laden internet vernacular up
to poor education.
They feel the same way as anyone would,
she writes, they just don't have the language to express it,
as if her language is somehow closer
to expressing the real honest truth of whatever grief
is objectively.
Chloe Malle on "Vogue" writes, "an Instagram feed
is just too public a platform for meaningful mourning,"
as if the ether of public places is
too diaphanous to transmit the density of sincerely
felt emotion.
In reality, grief is and often should be communal.
It's not a sign of weakness but an admission of loss,
a sign of humanity and empathy.
One cannot get through it because grief never ends.
Grief is not separate from day to day life but a part of it.
To say one cannot or should not love pizza and grieve
for the departed at the same time is to disrespect and deny
the truth of both grief and pizza.
And possibly the departed, most likely
they would want you to enjoy pizza.
If you would prefer to grieve privately
that is your right and no one can fault you.
There is no one correct way to mourn.
Historically, the communal sharing of grief online
is much more like the bereavement process
as it has existed at other times and places,
save for this brief lacuna where we've
been brought up to think of it as weak, shameful, and private,
not even given the choice.
A vast majority of the judgmental screeds concerned
with online mourning hold without question
or interrogation the assumption that grief
is solitary and the internet and the people on it are frauds.
In a piece for the "New York Times,"
Hannah Seligson renders the fake versus real grief dichotomy
as display versus distress.
On "The Atlantic," Megan Garber sees
endless misguided hand-wringing over what
happens when mourning becomes quote,
"as it were, hashtag content."
Garber calls those who bemoan the outward display of grief
online the grief police.
And the grief police are never in stronger show
than when people dare to mourn online for a celebrity.
[GASPING]
If the impulse to view social media mourning
as fraudulent display versus earnest distress
holds for when its subject is close to those posting,
we can only imagine how much this attitude is compounded
by the passing of a beloved musician, actor,
or statesperson.
If mourning becomes hashtag content
when posted about personal friends and family members,
then what unholy abomination does
it become when they don't even know the person.
So let's just get something straight.
One, if you're sitting down at your computer
like, going to let people know why their feelings are wrong,
maybe do some deep introspection as to why
you feel your commentary on the emotions of others
is required or helpful.
And two, distance or non-involvement
does not preclude emotional investment.
To make some crass but hopefully even somewhat clear
comparisons, do you get mad when your favorite sports
team loses.
You don't play for them.
What about when your favorite "Master Chef" competitor gets
cut or when a "Walking Dead" or "Game of Thrones" character
dies?
Should people pack in their disappointment
in these situations because they don't even know those people?
Part of being a person in the world
is allowing oneself to be affected
by a multitude of things within it.
Many things will have great impact and some of those things
will be larger-than-life entities in the public eye.
If you want to deny that artists, heads of state,
entrepreneurs, and performers can
have great emotional, aspirational, philosophical,
or intellectual impact on others,
we can disagree fundamentally and then
this conversation is over.
But if you allow that such a thing is possible,
you also have to allow that such impacts can
make people feel like those public figures helped
them become themselves.
This is why it's sad that David Bowie died,
and why I'm allowed to be sad and tweet about it.
I didn't know David Bowie, but at times it
felt remarkably like David Bowie knew me.
And what's more important, at times
it felt like he knew who I wanted to be.
This I'm sure is true for people who
mourn Oscar de la Renta, Amy Winehouse, Andy Warhol, Glenn
Frey, Harper Lee, Princess Diana, and John Lennon
at their passing and forever after.
Losing a creative hero is like losing a great teacher, someone
who knew things about the world you didn't but showed them
to you in this inviting way that encouraged
you to become yourself.
I like to think that we're all capable of understanding
why the loss of such an important figure
might result in grief.
MAN: Make your lives extraordinary.
But OK, you may say.
No one denies that you may feel bad,
but why do you have to advertise it online.
And my response is that we've already covered this.
But to reiterate, the mechanisms by which
we confront death in the West, especially in Europe
and America, are few, far between, and rather solitary,
shrouded in duty and discretion.
In a piece for "Newsweek" by Kyle Chayka,
gravestone creator David Quiring calls Americans death deniers.
But in its ongoing success at crystallizing
previously diasporic communities,
the internet has shown that contrary
to our received wisdom, it is cathartic and even healthy
to grieve online as a community.
The denial is confronted and despair is shared.
Lia Zneimer writes for "Wired" that
quote, "it's OK to just turn off our phones
and let ourselves mourn."
But as Megan Garber writes, "taking to the internet
to share and cry and commiserate is now
part of how we cope with a loss.
It is what we do.
But it is also, just as importantly, what is done."
Phones and the internet are in no necessary way
the opposite of mourning.
Saying the internet is not an appropriate context
for mourning indicates there is some list of places
which are appropriate.
And if you have access to this list,
I would love to see it so that I can
know where I am allowed to mourn,
which remember one is doing always
after the death of a loved one.
Am I no longer allowed to go to the library or the park?
What about bowling alleys or the mechanic?
Writing for NYU, Geoffrey Gorer says we are at a loss
and embarrassed when we do consciously meet a mourning.
He writes about how we feel we must distract people
from mourning, encourage them to seek new experiences
and move past it when really the opposite is true.
"During mourning the person is more in need of social support
and assistance than at any time since infancy
and early childhood," Gorer writes.
"And at the moment our society is signally
failing to give this support and assistance.
The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair,
and maladaptive behavior is very high," he writes.
By judging others for mourning, by telling them
that their feelings are wrong or misplaced, not
authentic or earnest, most of all
when they're expressed online or for celebrities, or both,
is one not distracting themselves from mourning.
Not from a specific instance of mourning but from mourning
as a whole, which as we've learned is costly.
So what do you guys think?
Let us know in the comments and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding cocktail glasses.
If you want to watch that one, you can click right here
or find a link in the doobly doo.
A huge thanks to everybody who came
to the fandom and marketing panel, and the PBS Digital
Studios meet up at South by Southwest.
It was great to meet some of you,
to see some of you again to say hey, hang out,
and see all y'alls shining faces in the Lone Star State.
Of course, my time in Austin was super brief,
so if I missed you I'm super sorry, maybe next time.
I flew in back to New York this mourning at like 4 o'clock
in the morning, so I feel crazy.
And speaking of y'all, the tweet of the week comes from
ohsoordinary ordinary who points us towards an "Atlantic"
article making a case for y'all.
And the reason I bring this up is because for a while now I
have been thinking about making the switch at the end of videos
to saying not what do you guys think but what do y'all think,
because it seems more inclusive.
It's also a lot more fun to say.
So I don't know, maybe ohsoordinary
gave me the final nudge and permission to do that.
Maybe we'll start.
And finally PBS Digital Studios is actually
doing a network-wide survey of its audience.
Because we want to know more about you, and who you are,
and what you're interested in, and where you get your internet
things from-- so we can figure out
how to serve you better and all of that other fun stuff.
So if you have an extra couple minutes,
it would be super rad if you wanted to take that survey.
There is a link to it in the description.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit,
links in the doobly doo.
And last, but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these folks who
want you to enjoy pizza forever and always.
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