The thesis explores the ubiquity of media within our daily lives and their influence on the formation of larger social structures, such as the mourning ritual. Despite its originally standardized, stereotyped and formal form, ritual also responds to and changes in accordance with social change. The aim of the master's thesis is to determine how the use of social networks changes the process of mourning and whether its shift from private to public mourning within social networks leads to the depersonalization of death. I probed the terrain of two selected social networks, Facebook and Instagram, and using discursive analysis as a qualitative research method, analyzed the various manifestations of grief that the selected networks provide to their users. After the analysis I came to the conclusion that social networks are changing the process of mourning itself, as it is being mediatized and traditional mourning practices are being moved to the online environment. The very normalization of the mourning ritual and the public expression of the latter in its constant emergence of social networks also lead to the depersonalization of death. Due to the social networking architecture, which consists of indirect interactions and the lack of face-to-face communication, users online can grieve only as a form of maintaining their online performance or as an empty gesture that is expected from them.
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