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Social memorial websites are virtual spaces where profiles are created for people who have died. These social memorial pages are accessible to the public and allow people to leave condolence messages, share the profiles on other social media websites and interact within the memorial website itself. Visitors are able to remember, celebrate and discover the life of that particular deceased person. Social memorials are typically started by someone's immediate family although pages are often created for deceased celebrities by strangers. Commemoration poses many difficulties for friends and family during the mourning process and it has been argued that social memorials are but one tool that addresses this problem. Social memorials are differentiated from other online forms of memorialization by being active places of commemoration and networking. Compared to the static pages of many online memorials, social memorials offer an interactive platform that allows people to post condolence messages, share information, upload photographs and videos and build shared spaces of meaning.

Virtual Memorialization
Social memorialization websites that offer to actively preserve the memory of a deceased person have been steadily growing in popularity since their inception in the 1990s. The use of participatory spaces on the Internet has revealed the ability for digital spaces to dramatically democratize the memorialization process and also may shed light on new emerging rituals surrounding death. With the proliferation of new digital technologies, social memorials allow people to collectively share their grief in new and easy ways. People need to externalize their grief and traditionally have done so through pilgrimage, material objects, cemeteries and monuments. Social memorials allow the mourner access to the dead through constructive mediums such as genealogy, photography and writing. Moreover, the ability to leave messages of condolence and to interact with the memorial website, allows people to write themselves and their loved ones into individual and collective memory. While serving to facilitate a connection between living and dead, the ambivalent and ephemeral qualities of social memorials become identity building tools in that they allow us to transform collective identity by writing into the person’s memorial what we want of ourselves and what we want of the person’s social memorial and what we want to present to the public.

Social memorials and the connections they make speak to the necessity of keeping memories alive while simultaneously forming the identities of the mourner and deceased through public display. Social memorials work to close the gap between the living and the dead. The constant movement within websites and the ability of immediate visitation, archiving of one life’s moments and the similarity between social media profiles for the dead and living break the boundaries of death.

Grief and Memorialization
In the West, the grieving process is often seen as fomenting negative emotions. Mourners are often told to “get over it” or to “move on” after an indeterminate amount of time has passed following a death. This sentiment often betrays the reality of grief: that it is a process which takes many forms and has no set time limit. Grieving rituals disconnect the dead and the living by allowing people to overcome their negative emotions. However they also connect the two through private and public conversation. Western funerals are assumed to be a “realignment process” that re-integrates the bereaved into a network of supportive relationships Humans look to form collective memories. David Chidester writes that as a culture we need to form collective memories and commemorations in order to keep people alive. These include funerals, cemeteries, shrines and memorials. Traditionally memorials have occupied physical spaces such as monuments, plaques and tombstones however social memorials speak to a blurring of lines between what was once seen a the separate magisteria of religion and technology(stolow). Physical memorials can also be imbued with governmentality, politics, race relations and notions of war and valor(hask 401) and so social memorials are a way of integrating the public voice back into memorialization. Expressions of grief are mediated and sanctioned by particular cultural norms and standards and social memorials contribute to new ways of talking about death that ensure we are never forgotten, our lifes work remembered and our death visible.