Grieving in the Age of the Algorithm: How Digital Platforms Shape Modern Mourning
When loss moves online, our rituals of remembrance evolve with it. This is how technology, community, and grief intertwine in the digital age.
A Chinese food vlogger known as Yishiji uploaded a farewell video to the social platform Bilibili in 2022, he left behind more than a message. His video became a living memorial. Three years later, the post continues to receive comments, gifts, and conversations from followers who speak to him as though he were still present.
A recent study by Chuanlin Ning, titled “You Have Not Disappeared: Digital Mourning Spaces After a Social Media Celebrity’s Self-Obituary,” explores what happens when grief unfolds within the architecture of social media. Rather than a static post, the video evolved into a dynamic mourning space co-created by users, algorithms, and the design of the platform itself.
The study reminds us that digital platforms are not neutral backdrops. They actively shape how we grieve, connect, and remember.
The Platform as Ritual Space
Ning’s research examines how Bilibili’s features, especially its danmu (floating, time-synced comments), transform mourning into an interactive and ongoing ritual. Viewers can type messages that drift across the video while it plays. When Yishiji said, “May you all be happy for the rest of your lives,” hundreds of viewers responded in real time. Their words filled the screen like a digital chorus of farewell.
The study identifies four characteristics of this type of digital mourning space:
Sustained creation of content: Instead of grief peaking and fading, comments and tributes continue for years, turning the page into a living memorial.
Blended time and space: The danmu feature lets the past and present coexist. Each new comment becomes part of an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead.
Semi-public participation: These spaces are neither fully private nor entirely open. They allow personal mourning within a shared, semi-public environment.
Connection among mourners: Commenters form bonds not only with the deceased but also with one another, creating a sense of community through shared loss.
Ning argues that this space functions like a new kind of public memorial institution, one that emerges organically through participation rather than through formal design.
From Container to Co-Creator
Media scholar Johanna Sumiala has described how, in the digital age, death becomes a “media ritual.” Technologies do not simply host grief; they perform it. Ning’s research illustrates this idea in action.
The platform does not just display mourning, it scripts it. Algorithms decide which comments rise to the top, how posts circulate, and when the memorial resurfaces in people’s feeds. Even the interface itself—scrolling text, timestamps, and like counts—shapes how emotions are expressed and witnessed.
In this way, digital technologies act as co-creators of grief. They influence who participates, what is seen, and how memory is sustained. The boundary between human mourning and technological mediation becomes blurred.
The Changing Nature of Presence and Loss
Traditional mourning rituals often move toward closure. Funerals mark an ending; memorials stabilise memory. In contrast, digital grief is ongoing. It loops, refreshes, and reappears in the feed. Each algorithmic resurfacing of a video or post can reopen the emotional connection.
For some, this persistence offers comfort and community. For others, it can make closure elusive. The person who has died feels both gone and present, absence and presence intertwined.
The space also redistributes who gets to mourn. Strangers, followers, and queer community members who may have been excluded from traditional mourning rituals find belonging online. Yishiji, a gay man who spoke about isolation before his death, is now remembered by a wide network of mourners who might otherwise have had no place to grieve him.
What Practitioners Can Learn
For therapists, social workers, and community practitioners, Ning’s findings highlight how grief is increasingly shaped by digital architecture.
Treat online memorials as meaningful spaces of grief. Clients returning to posts or comment threads are engaging in ritual, not avoidance.
Understand platform influence. Algorithms and comment systems affect what memories appear and when. Helping clients develop awareness of this can prevent unwanted re-exposure or emotional overwhelm.
Reframe closure. Digital mourning often resists finality. Practitioners can support healthy engagement rather than insisting on letting go.
Acknowledge community and visibility. For marginalised people, digital spaces can democratise remembrance and offer inclusion that offline rituals sometimes deny.
Discuss consent and legacy. Conversations about digital afterlives—what remains, what is deleted, who controls the content—should become part of end-of-life planning and grief education.
Grief in the Hands of Technology
The paper’s central insight is simple yet profound: technology does not just record grief, it performs it. Every like, comment, and algorithmic recommendation contributes to a collective ritual of remembrance.
As Ning writes, digital mourning spaces reveal “the persistence of the dead and the participation of the living.” They are neither wholly sacred nor profane, neither private nor public. They are places where memory, emotion, and technology intertwine.
In recognising this, we begin to see that grief itself is changing form. It no longer resides only in cemeteries or photo albums but also in the coded, luminous spaces of the internet. Here, love and loss continue to speak, pixel by pixel, long after the voice that began them has fallen silent.
Reference
Ning, C. (2025). You Have Not Disappeared: Digital Mourning Spaces After a Social Media Celebrity’s Self-Obituary. Media and Communication, 13(2). https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/10726