Thanatosensitive Social Media Design (Through the Example of Facebook)

The development of the digital sphere for the last decades states that not only every day or professional practices are being digitalized but also death, funeral, and bereavement. These process — death, funeral, and bereavement — are social and publicly available processes. That is why it is required to take social actions. Moreover, open new possibilities and opportunities for death, funerals, bereavement, grief, and mourning: with the help of the Internet those processes are being digitalized. The Internet creates the digital afterlife situation, i.e. new ways of experiences the presence of a deceased person being near to those ones who are in grief. In this study, the potential thanatosensitive social media design is examined. Thanatosensitivity describes an epistemological-methodological approach into technological research and design that actively seeks to integrate the facts of mortality, dying, and death into traditional user-centered design. This paper describes how the thanatosensitive interfaces work, what their purposes are and what kinds of difficulties the users have in using these interfaces. Also, the implementations problems are covered. The results of this study are significant for planning and designing thanatosensitive services and user experience in social networks.