Grieving increasingly being expressed and supported online

Models made by Samsung and Acer offer fast boot-up times — under 20 seconds — weigh about 3 pounds or less and are priced starting at $199. The concept got a boost last week when Samsung and Google announced that Chromebooks will be offered to public schools for $99 in partnership with DonorsChoose.org. Teachers can sign up up to purchase up to 30 machines by applying to DonorsChoose before Dec. 21.

Email ogallaga@statesman.com

Almost a year ago, my grandmother got sick. In early January, she died.

I can remember many of the details of the hospital room, the funeral home, the two trips to South Texas, the expressions on the faces of family members as we began to understand that she wasn’t going to pull through.

But it probably says a lot that I didn’t have any recollection of who I might have been talking to online those weeks, what I tweeted about her death or who offered their condolences via social networks. Though I spend lots of time online and do most of my communicating with family and friends there, I know I felt very conflicted about what, if anything, to share on the web about it. It all suddenly felt too personal, and I worried about being tacky by appearing to seek sympathy from people online, or hurting the feelings of family members by oversharing with people who never knew her.

I recently looked back at my Facebook Timeline from earlier this year and was surprised by what was there. I made a mention that we were saying goodbye to her for the last time. A week later, I posted a link to my grandmother’s obituary. If you took those two Facebook posts out of the mix, you would never know anything had happened. The rest of my timeline contained the usual assortment of silly jokes, links to tech news, Instagram photos and random meme material.

And a month later, I wrote a lengthy blog post on my personal website expressing more fully my feelings and memories. Before that, I was clearly using social media to distract and disconnect from what was really going on, at least publicly.

We all grieve in different ways, but grief itself is a great commonality. Increasingly, many of us find ourselves mourning online, reaching out to others for support in tough times using the tools most readily available. But nobody has told us what the best way to share bad news on social media might be. Should there be a mourning period in which we avoid the web’s siren call completely?

In the past few months, I’ve watched friends struggle with family deaths with the help of far-flung online friends who’ve offered advice and support. I’ve also seen people announce deaths on Twitter or Facebook, often setting up memorial pages online as well.

One person, a journalist I follow, live-tweeted the funeral of a friend. The deceased was a heavy social media user and the family appeared to be fine with the public updates about the memorial service. But others were critical of the act, suggesting that the focus shifted from the departed to the reporter and that he couldn’t have been emotionally present for the funeral while posting micro updates.

Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist and author of “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality,” says that in a time of rapid technological disruption, the social mores around grief and mourning are bound to change.

“These situations are now hardly unusual as the technology moves faster than our ability to develop proper etiquette for using it,” Aboujaoude said. “What used to horrify us only a couple of years ago, such as texting while driving or texting in the middle of a nice dinner at a nice restaurant is now entirely commonplace.”

Aboujaoude believes that since we express every other emotion virtually, it’s natural that we take our grief online as well. But it can make our grief interactive in unexpected ways (inviting, say, horrible anonymous comments from trolls) or keep us disengaged as we try to process loss.

“Grief is hard work and requires a certain degree of focus and devoted attention. Since these are in short supply in the virtual world, we tend to experience grief differently in cyberspace than we do offline,” he said.

Since the rise of the Internet, there have been online support groups to express grief and connect with others who are mourning. But social media has accelerated the input and output of even that kind of information. Is it possible that such a high-volume medium is beneficial to the grieving process beyond simply making someone feel more connected when they might otherwise feel alone?

“Grief can be isolating for people,” said Barbara Jones, an associate professor and co-director of the Institute for Grief, Loss and Family Survival at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Social Work. “Using the web to memorialize someone you care about means that your grief is seen and witnessed by others. The person you cared about is still virtually living in some way.”

Perhaps counter-intuitive to the idea that the online world can be a cold, impersonal place, Jones says some research suggests that grieving online can have some clear benefits. “Technological connectedness can in fact mitigate symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress,” she said. That can be dependent on many factors including the circumstances of the death, the grief-stricken person’s existing relationship with technology and how they typically communicate with loved ones.

In the same way that tweets and status updates never really go away even if you delete them, online memorials may be one way to keep a person’s memory alive, a kind of post-mortem social networking. Many online memorial sites now exist to post photos and comments when someone dies, and on Facebook there’s a way to convert a person’s profile into a memorial page after they pass away.

Jones says that it seems to align with the fact that grief never really goes away. “We don’t stop loving or missing the person who has died,” she said. “This can be an attempt to stay connected and to have a continuous bond to the person who is no longer in the world.”