Concerning the Ache of Others, on Social Media
After dropping my mom and father to most cancers final yr, I went to social media to seek out some solace in my grief. Pandemic restrictions had been nonetheless in place in New York Metropolis; I couldn’t see my buddies a lot in individual; and it felt like folks simply needed to depart the room at any time when I began speaking about demise and dying. On-line, I discovered my one dependable supply of consolation after this loss: Instagram accounts the place different folks had been internet hosting intimate websites of mourning, utilizing images and video to doc their very own experiences processing the lack of a beloved one. Whereas some platforms are private, others have demise doulas and end-of-life caregivers chatting with broader audiences about demise and grief. With between 40,000 and 96,000 followers or extra, the bigger platforms are run by ladies who heart their work on serving to others course of or really feel much less alone of their grief.
Surprisingly, grief accounts gained reputation right here on a platform that caters primarily to curated “authenticity,” happiness, and displaying one’s greatest self on-line. Whereas influencers market their manufacturers utilizing images that seize magnificence beliefs and a way of upward mobility (issues at all times getting higher), grief accounts have began popping up, providing a unique message.
Curator and author Marvin Heiferman, who documented his grief on Instagram after his husband Maurice Berger died immediately of Covid two years in the past, expressed in an interview with LitHub:
The pandemic was upending lives in a number of methods. Anxiousness, concern, and grief had been widespread. And on a social media platform recognized for its relentless branding of happiness, I turned a grief man, posting photos of my 24/7 unhappiness, confusion, and the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mode I used to be left alone to function in.
All through 2021, I pressed “like” on posts by individuals who shared movies to normalize conversations about end-of-life care. I engaged and commented on posts by caregivers and demise doulas of shade, similar to Oceana Sawyer and Alua Arthur, who requested, “What does a superb demise appear like for folks in our neighborhood who need to reside with fixed demise nervousness?” I scrolled by means of accounts hosted by social staff providing sources and grief coaches who jogged my memory that preserving my mother’s worn footwear or listening to my dad’s voicemails is a standard a part of the grief course of.
I might relate to that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mode described by Heiferman, as I had now change into the digital grief-lurker. By witnessing how others expressed their grief on-line, I used to be in a position to put my very own into some language. I used to be haunted, for instance, by demise doula Naomi Edmondson’s publish, who shared a private {photograph} together with her on-line neighborhood expressing the unhappiness of one other yr passing with out her mom round.
When demise doula and neighborhood activist Alua Arthur was asking us to cease scrolling and provides her one minute of our lives to cease and take into consideration demise, I gave her that minute.
These accounts, all with stunning photos and aesthetic components, had been now competing for my consideration in a platform the place algorithms decide one’s curated content material, however they demanded one thing completely different from me. It wasn’t a matter of urgent “like” on an influencer’s publish recommending a specific underwear model or commenting on my buddy’s wedding ceremony photos in Mexico. Viewing different folks’s grief posts required that I empathize with and acknowledge the ache of others. However, sooner or later, I began to really feel uneasy, even anxious about scrolling by means of stunning, catchy photos that portrayed the ache of others, feeling like I wasn’t giving them the suitable ethical response.
Susan Sontag, who centered on photos of conflict and violence, noticed the issue concerning responding with enthusiasm to pictures of struggling or the ache of others. In her e book On Images (1977), she takes an anti-aesthetic stance and argues {that a} {photograph} of a struggling individual solely aestheticizes the struggling for the viewer’s pleasure. However the latter Sontag modified her thoughts earlier than her demise and insisted in her final e book, Concerning the Ache of Others (2003), that such {a photograph} can have a sustainable moral-political impact exactly due to its aesthetics. So, now magnificence is important once more, and it doesn’t simply serve a viewer’s pleasure.
I believe each arguments made by Sontag are right and will be utilized to those present, digital instances. Specializing in a picture’s aesthetic and sweetness methods can certainly contribute to distancing us from the expertise of ache that the creator is making an attempt to painting. It may also have an effect on the way in which we reply to those photos. But, on the similar time — and right here is the place Sontag’s later argument is available in — “Narratives could make us perceive. Pictures do one thing else: They hang-out us,” she writes.
Resulting from magnificence and their aesthetic components, photos could make us cease to assume, interact, and empathize. And in my view, that is good. Magnificence can create distance and stop us from recognizing or empathizing with the ache that the picture is making an attempt to painting. However it will probably additionally seize our consideration, hang-out us, and even demand an extra response from us. Sontag centered on this “haunting impact” in her final e book earlier than she died of lung most cancers. She by no means lived to expertise Instagram or image-centered social media platforms. Nonetheless, I imagine her argument additionally applies to non-public and neighborhood grief accounts and different digital mourning websites within the current.
Positive, the aesthetic components in a publish may distance us from the truth of grief, however they may additionally do the alternative and invite us to take a more in-depth look. Concerning grief accounts, concerning the ache of others, even when one picture made us cease scrolling for a minute to consider our mortality, about what a “good demise” seems like, then that’s good. And if the picture can inspire us additional into advocating on the stage of coverage and neighborhood to permit everybody to achieve that “good demise,” then possibly the picture did its job. And on the finish of the day, it’s as much as us, viewers or scrollers, to resolve the best way to reply.