Covid-19, distanziamento sociale e social media: sospensioni, accelerazioni e prospettive di ricerca sul lutto online

The article reflects on the main changes produced by the Covid-19 epidemic on death and mourning practices with a specific focus on media and digital platforms. In the lockdown, ordinary forms of social relations and physical proximity were suspended, and media and platforms played an extraordinary role both as information sources and as mediated spaces of interaction. Social distancing and, more specifically, the suspension of funeral celebrations have made social networks the only place to communicate deaths, to express closeness, to cultivate memory, inscribing, as far as possible, grieving in a social dimension. As in many other areas of daily life, the epidemic has produced an acceleration in the processes of social incorporation of digital technologies for death-related uses. It is not known whether this acceleration will translate into a stable use of social media for this type of practice. Certainly, however, what has happened questions us on many issues. To name a few: the social acceptance of the media within funeral rituals, the need to reflect on new grammar of emotion in the world in which they are located online, the datafication and commodification of the experience of death and mourning.