“Mamba Forever”
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “All Media Group” (ID: quanmeipai) author: Tencent media.
For Lakers fans around the world, January 26, 2020 is a doomed day when Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter accident. The sudden death of “Black Mamba” left many people falling into a great sense of unrealism. Instantly, the global social network was shrouded in a sea of sadness, and people around the world spoke to Kobe through text, video and other forms The sentimental grief has continued for the past three months.
A long time ago, we often learned about the celebrity’s death on television and newspapers, and silently felt this huge shock and grief in our hearts. With the rapid rise of social media, each individual’s mourning for the celebrity can be expressed on the public platform, which also forms a “mourning culture” different from the past.
So, what’s so special about mourning a lost celebrity on social media? Does it make our attitude towards death frivolous, or even make death a show of consumption and self? This issue of All Media (ID: quanmeipai) hopes to commemorate Kobe from another angle by reflecting on the “celebrity mourning culture” in the social media era.
The meaning of “cloud mourning”: Go to the digital mausoleum to keep warm
As social media such as Facebook and Weibo are deeply embedded in people’s daily lives, they are not only a place where people spend nearly a third of their time showing and browsing “life” every day, but now they are also facing the death Plays an important role here. The rapid spread of social media is a key reason why mourning for celebrities is becoming more and more likely to become a public event.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Facebook had fewer than 400 million users and Twitter had less than 18 million users. By 2020, these two figures will exceed 2.4 billion and 500 million, respectively. At the same time, social media ’s unique technology, Affordance, offers more possibilities for mourning.
Scholars Caroll and LaNdry’s research in 2010 showed that online mourning can overcome the barriers of time and space, allowing fans everywhere to pin their own griefs in time and effectively relieve their pain. For fans of stylistic stars, this emotional connection that overcomes time and space barriers is particularly important. Fans and celebrities are generally unlikely to meet and meet each other, and the various social media homepages of celebrities often become an important field of connection between the two sides. When the stars suddenly died, their social media homepage became a kind of “Digital Remain”, like a mausoleum in a virtual world, which continued to carry fans’ feelings about the stars.
The scholar Jessica Mitchell believes that continuing to leave messages on the deceased’s homepage has become an important way to maintain the connection between the living and the dead. A study by Lisbeth Klastrup that tracked the content of actor Vin Diesel’s Facebook page between 2013 and 2015 also found that Die Walker ’s partner, Paul Walker, in the film Speed and Furious series was unexpected After his death, his mourning content is often easy to resonate with their fans. Fans use Diesel’s homepage to confide in their hearts about Paul Walker.
After Kobe’s death, conversational messages such as “Thank you for giving me my entire youth” and “You took me into the basketball world” were left on his Weibo homepage. Through the continuous interaction with the deceased stars in the “Digital Tomb”, the fans received psychological comfort.
It turns out that the high degree of relevance of social media (Associability) allows people caught in the same kind of grief to warm up in groups. If Benedict Anderson believes that the invention of the print media created the “imaginary community” of the nation, then social media is creating a grief that can build social support through continuous interaction, and then directly face the death of others. A “Community of Mourning” alone.
Purdue University professor Heather Servaty-Seib mentioned that when his favorite singer Prince Rogers Nelson died, many friends who hadn’t contacted for a long time but had loved Prince together were socializing. The media resumed contacting him, listening to Prince’s songs together, talking about the past years. He believes that the deaths of important celebrities may even reshape or strengthen a communist under the media of social media.Emotional connection in the same body.
A 2015 study also found that online mourning is not only a simple “mourning”, but also a “share”. The narrative identity of mourners is often directed to other peers, and the content they express Looking forward to the comfort of others in direct contact with others.
Besides this, this study also reveals another important significance of social media mourning: by providing an emotional outlet, giving meaning to what otherwise meant meaningless death. The mourners often compare the deceased to some kind of spiritual symbol in the sorrowful text, and have a deep connection with their lives. In the sociological masterpiece “Social Construction of Reality”, Berg and Lukman call “talking” an “important tool for maintaining reality.” By talking and telling, people can organize their chaotic experiences. In the process of telling netizens about their unstable emotions, they “obtained a clear outline” and were placed in a position of significance in life.
For example, after Kobe ’s death, a Filipino fan commented on Twitter: “Although I do n’t play basketball anymore, Kobe is still a very important part of my childhood memories because I like him together, I had some of the most precious friendships at the time. “The memory of Kobe also made us cherish these precious friendships in life. In addition to helping mourners “hold the ball for warmth,” social media also helps us find meaning in our testimony of death.
Pros and cons of social media: provide convenience, wear a shackle
The word “convenience” doesn’t seem to be a key consideration during the memorial service. The “conveniences” provided by social media have also been unexpectedly criticized many times.
The sociologist Marshall Berman’s phrase, “Everything solid is gone” is a good description of the current Internet age. The network seems to have no memory, and the speed of hotspot changes is constantly accelerating. It may be the death of a celebrity in the last second, and the video of the food blogger will be printed in the next second. All the events that should have left a deep impression on memory are diluted by the continuously accelerating flow of information.
Claire Wilmot, columnist of the Atlantic Monthly, criticizes online mourning. He believes that “the short and flat media attributes of social media make mourning death extremely frivolous and simple, as if it can be done with just a finger.” Fragmented expression is even moreThose who don’t watch basketball can also complete a “cloud mourning” of Kobe with the simplest copywriting.
Claire further stated: “Social media makes it easy to share grief, but it has not shaped a public culture that makes us more sensitive to ‘lost’.”
In fact, judging from the mourning atmosphere created by the entire social media, the various oolong mourning words that mistakenly regarded Kobe as other basketball players, football stars, and singers and actresses have indeed dispelled the meaning of nostalgia and made serious Things get funny.
As the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The media is the message”, the influence of the media on society is not in the content it carries. The technical attributes of the media can shape a brand-new information environment and people. Way of perception.
As a loyal supporter of McLuhan, the scholar Gershon discovered an interesting phenomenon in a teaching. In answering the question, “What kind of breakup is bad?” Many people mentioned that if Facebook Breaking up can be very offensive. Gershon accordingly put forward the concept of “Media Ideology” in his works. The technical characteristics of different media often give different meanings and effects to the expression of the same content.
Samantha Kemp-Jackson believes that the technical characteristics of social media as mentioned above make it look more like a field for us to relax and entertain. It is more suitable for nurturing cultures such as selfies and beauty. Serious death topics are incompatible, and mourning the dead on social media always feels a bit inappropriate.
In addition to the disrespect for the deceased, another questioning of “cloud mourning” is directed to the mourners themselves. Many people think that this way of mourning the deceased will not only effectively relieve the grief in people ’s hearts, but may add some extra Anxiety.
Emotional sociology believes that human emotion is not just a physical or psychological mechanism.
The word “convenience” doesn’t seem to be a key consideration during the memorial service. The “conveniences” provided by social media have also been unexpectedly criticized many times.
The sociologist Marshall Berman’s phrase, “Everything solid is gone” is a good description of the current Internet age. The network seems to have no memory, and the speed of hotspot changes is constantly accelerating. It may be the death of a celebrity in the last second, and the video of the food blogger will be printed in the next second. All the events that should have left a deep impression on memory are diluted by the continuously accelerating flow of information.
Claire Wilmot, columnist of the Atlantic Monthly, criticizes online mourning. He believes that “the short and flat media attributes of social media make mourning death extremely frivolous and simple, as if it can be done with just a finger.” Fragmented expression is even moreThose who don’t watch basketball can also complete a “cloud mourning” of Kobe with the simplest copywriting.
Claire further stated: “Social media makes it easy to share grief, but it has not shaped a public culture that makes us more sensitive to ‘lost’.”
In fact, judging from the mourning atmosphere created by the entire social media, the various oolong mourning words that mistakenly regarded Kobe as other basketball players, football stars, and singers and actresses have indeed dispelled the meaning of nostalgia and made serious Things get funny.
As the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The media is the message”, the influence of the media on society is not in the content it carries. The technical attributes of the media can shape a brand-new information environment and people. Way of perception.
As a loyal supporter of McLuhan, the scholar Gershon discovered an interesting phenomenon in a teaching. In answering the question, “What kind of breakup is bad?” Many people mentioned that if Facebook Breaking up can be very offensive. Gershon accordingly put forward the concept of “Media Ideology” in his works. The technical characteristics of different media often give different meanings and effects to the expression of the same content.
Samantha Kemp-Jackson believes that the technical characteristics of social media as mentioned above make it look more like a field for us to relax and entertain. It is more suitable for nurturing cultures such as selfies and beauty. Serious death topics are incompatible, and mourning the dead on social media always feels a bit inappropriate.
In addition to the disrespect for the deceased, another questioning of “cloud mourning” is directed to the mourners themselves. Many people think that this way of mourning the deceased will not only effectively relieve the grief in people ’s hearts, but may add some extra Anxiety.
Emotional sociology believes that human emotion is not just a physical or psychological mechanism.