Jed was recently quoted in articles in the Huffington Post and the German Magazine PAGE about death, Facebook profiles, and digital identity. “Facebook doesn’t do a good job of thinking about death,” says Brubaker, the scholar who studies death on social media. “It doesn’t have that concept. There’s no checkbox that says ‘I am dead,’ [...]

Jed Brubaker will be a guest on Iowa Public Radio’s show “Talk of Iowa” tomorrow morning (July, 11, 2012; Wednesday, 10 AM Central/Noon PST). The segment is on the ways in which social media is impacting death and grief. Link to the talk show session: [Jed's online at 31:45 till 48:57] http://news.iowapublicradio.org/post/mourning-digital-age More information on [...]

Congratulations goes to Brubaker, Kivran-Swaine, Taber, and Hayes as their ICWSM 2012 submission, “Grief-Stricken in a Crowd: The language of bereavement and distress in social media” was nominated for a best paper award! Congratulations and good luck in Dublin!

STAR Group members will be presenting a paper at the ICWSM 2012 conference. Brubaker, J. R., Kivran-Swaine, F., Taber, L., and Hayes, G. R. (2012). Grief-Stricken in a Crowd: The language of bereavement and distress in social media. Proc ICWSM-12. Dublin, Ireland. June 4-8, 2012. Congratulations to the authors! We hope to see you all [...]

The death of a user does not result in the elimination of his or her account nor the profile’s place inside a network of digital peers. Friends use profiles postmortem to say last goodbyes, share memories, and coordinate funereal arrangements. These practices highlight three important themes for social networks and the representation of identity for their users: embodiment, representation, and temporality.

Congratulations to Jed Brubaker and Janet Vertesi on the acceptance of their paper on death and social networking sites to the CHI 2010 workshop HCI at the End of Life. Death and the Social Network Jed R. Brubaker & Janet Vertesi We analyze profiles and associated comments on social network sites following the death of [...]