ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOURNING — WE ARE LOSING THE PRIVACY OF GRIEF
When my beloved grandma died some years ago, I was still wrapped in the solemnity of my grief when my friend called me, intruding on the on the privacy of my mourning to offer her condolences. My sister had uploaded it on Facebook.
While I appreciate her call and her sincere concern for me, and that point when she called, what I wanted was to grief in private, to take in the reality of losing someone I loved so dearly, to process the myriad feeling inside me, and just grief collectively with my family, her family. I don’t want any intrusion from outsiders. But the way we interact on social media today, we have robbed ourselves of the privacy of intimate times like grieving.
Today, people lose a lost loved one and three minutes later they’ve already posted it on their WhatsApp status or Facebook wall. These platforms have become an extension of our private life. Like anthropologists at UCL said, “we have become human snails carrying our homes in our pocket.”
I can’t dictate to people how they should mourn. But I think there are few occasions that allow us the opportunity to reflect on life and what it means; that brings us back to the basic reality of our life, such as death. And I think that grieving for a loved one should be a private and intimate moment, at least for the first few hours or days. But we’ve lost that.
Back then in the university, my cousin lost her mother to cancer. She got the news of her mother’s death on Facebook. One of her friends had uploaded it. Let that sink in for a moment. She wasn’t aware of mother’s emergency health crisis. She just logged in on Facebook that fateful evening to see the news of her own mother’s death. If there’s anything that sums up the intrusion I’m talking about, that was it.
I may excuse the bereaved of posting about their loss immediately after they hear the news, but I think outsiders have no right to do that. They should wait, observe and see if the bereaved have posted it, if they want to share their grief with the world before going to post it.
Rushing to post on social media not only revealed our inability to reflect on life and death — I get it, not everyone has the time for that, — it has also shown that we have little or no respect for human life; we don’t dignify the human body. You see people sharing gory pictures and videos of people in different morbid state, no dignity, no respect for that thing called life. Victims of accident suffer the worse fate. People would rather whip out their phone to video than to rush them to the hospital for help. And when they die, their pictures are scattered all over the internet in that inglorious state of deformation and death.
The other day, a friend posted a video of someone, an official of an electricity company, being electrocuted. I mean, someone had the heart to capture another human losing his life painfully and he or she posted it! What kind of callous insensitivity is that? We have really lost it; we have lost the sensitivity that makes us human. We can now use everything for content, we share anything on social media.
Social media has interrupted our privacy and inner world. And this is self inflicted as we are quick to share every moment with strangers on Facebook. And that is fine, it’s a way of journalling, of sharing our lived experience with people for different reasons. But the question is, where do we draw the line on what should make it to our WhatsApp status or Facebook wall and what should not? How do we build the walls to guard the privacy of certain moments? Because these days, even infant make their first appearance on social media when they’re just a few hours old, baptising them into the world of likes, comments and shares.
I am afraid that we’re becoming less private beings, less in tune with our intrinsic world. We are becoming less capable to handle solitude and boredom; we no longer cherish and keep the intimacy that some moments afford us to ourselves. We just have to post that picture for the gram. We are becoming more insensitive to things; in short, social media has disrupted what it means to be human, and intimacy is not the only thing that we are losing, we are losing our sensibility too. It is a social malaise.
