| Popis: |
Online elaboration of mourning is a kind of technospiritual practice, a typical area of which involves communication with the deceased and postmortem profile management via community pages. This chapter compares the results from the international literature investigating the connection between online elaborations of mourning and community pages that include posts and comments regarding the topic of death. We focus on messages that appear in Hungarian on Facebook. This corpus-based study confirms claims that concern similar messages found on English-language social networking services (SNSs). Along with the obvious emotive function, mourning texts occurring in social media may fulfill referential (information on the funeral, circumstances of death), appellative (notification, marketing), phatic (condolence to the living; last farewell to, or continuous contact with, the deceased), metacommunicative (adequacy of online mourning), and aesthetic functions (quotations from poetry or prose, pictures, montages, presentations). With respect to the phatic function, we also examine the issue of legitimacy/illegitimacy of mourning (death tourism, trolls). The occurrence of religious themes is relatively infrequent in the digital corpus studied here. The Facebook feature “Like,” in this context, means a special manifestation of sympathy and commemoration rather than whether a message’s content pleases the reader. |
