Just as life, for many, now takes place both online and in the physical world, so too does death. Social media has brought back the kind of public grieving often seen in ancient Greece—open performances of sadness that bring people together for communal mourning. And a new study shows that the connections made online after a loss can last for years to come.
In the study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Will Hobbs and Moira Burke looked at data from more than 15,000 Facebook networks of people who died (the profiles were de-identified), and a control group of more than 30,000 networks where no one died. They examined the period from 2011 to 2015, and all the deaths occurred between 2012 and 2013, allowing them to see how people interacted in those networks both before and after a death.
[For more of this story, written by Julie Beck, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/te...fter-a-death/524289/]
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