How (and why) we’re sad on Instagram. It’s difficult. | Tech Reddy

Depression and grief are difficult emotions to navigate, made even more so when combined with the ever-changing social landscape of digital culture. You want to share information about your deceased friend, but you don’t want to share information about them. You want to grieve with the community of friends, but you don’t know if your relationship with the person you’ve lost is close enough to deal with your grief. You want to show support to other loved ones who are grieving their loss, but you don’t know what to do.

It’s all dark and inescapable – IRL and online. Everything changed in the way we went about mourning someone’s death when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We couldn’t meet in person; could not be kept awake; we couldn’t say goodbye to our loved ones in the hospital. Unable to mourn in the past, for months, we mourned online, where communities of grief grew out of the past. There are many communities dedicated to depression online: GriefTok on TikTok, multiple pages on Instagram, r/dark on Reddit, pages on Facebook, you name it. The lyrics “take his name out of your mouth / you don’t deserve to be sad” are highlighted in 87,000 TikTok videos use CRAWLERS’ “Come (Again).” As with all areas of life that take a dangerous path from reality to social media, something changes in the way we feel, relate, and explore our grief. we share it online. It’s good, it’s bad, it’s hard – just like the process of grieving.

Jensen Moore’s cousin died in 2011. Almost immediately after her death, Moore noticed that everyone — family, friends, everyone who knew her — was reading about her. relative to his relative’s Facebook page. A bright page from Moore’s cousin’s life has now become a memorial.

“I went to the funeral and the wake, and the people who attended those events were on his page honoring him there,” recalled Moore, now an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. . “The meeting in person seems like it’s more about the family than talking about it.”

Moore thought about how the internet could change our depression. He began by rejecting some of the research coming out of clinical psychiatry about the terminally ill’s use of social media as a form of diary for their final days, knowing that they would be alive behind them. This “opened up a whole new space for me to look at the mourner, and how the mourner responds to the person trying to share their life before they die.”

Moore went to study in this area. In one of his research papers, Social Media Personality: Using Theory to Explore How People Feel on Social Networking Sites, he found that people prefer to cry on social media for a variety of reasons. They can reflect without being able to work face to face; to cry, to cry alone, but to connect with a community when ready.

This is also why one of my Instagram followers told me that she prefers to cry on Instagram. He said it’s “easy for friends to offer words of support without getting into long conversations where you don’t know what to say.” Another student said it’s good to know you have the love and support of your friends and that “it’s good to have a way to get to know everyone without having to reach out to people.”

At the same time, that student told me “it’s sad because everyone says the same thing, ‘sorry about your loss.’ [It’s] It helps that they’re thinking about you but they’re not, because thinking isn’t a hug.”

How sad are people on Instagram?

One way to get people upset on Instagram is to comment on a page like a reminder. If someone you know has died, authorized family members can request that the page be removed. But anyone can send a request to Instagram to remember the score but, according to Instagram. Instagram requires proof of death – such as a link to an obituary or story – before it remembers an account, and family members can cancel a request.

As Vice pointed out a piece about the impact of COVID-19 on depressionreminding people on social media is just the latest iteration of a practice we’ve been involved in for centuries.

“There’s no doubt that new media technology will be used to commemorate the dead. It’s just our job,” John Troyer, director of the University of Bath’s Institute for Death & Society, told Vice. “So, this does not reduce the sadness, it’s always the risk of new technologies – because something new is considered at first not necessary to use. I remember, many years ago, the brushing teeth about using Facebook to remember someone who died, and how to ease the pain of grief. Of course, it’s not true.”

Desmond Pattona professor at the Columbia School of Social Work and Department of Sociology, told Mashable that Instagram has introduced “new ways to expand the image of our previous depression.”

Before Instagram, we always wrote messages to our loved ones to comfort them in the dark, connected to our community, shared stories, and death stories. But Patton says what makes Instagram different is that “we can bring others into that experience.”

That socializing power of Instagram, although it is very important, is very important, because it allows people to share and stay in the community when things are very difficult.

“You may have a chance to process it because you don’t have the words or you don’t feel like you have the physical community to be able to handle this,” Patton said. “There is something that happens behind the keyboard that allows for many levels of vulnerability that I think is also very important. So you can find others who are upset. It is very important great, because people can share and be a community when things are really hard.”

Insta-dark as a form of action

Most of the time, we don’t just miss our loved ones. Sometimes, we are grieving someone lost because of violence — police violence, government violence, etc. In those cases, depression on Instagram can be a form of alarm.

Jolene Holgate, director of training and education for the Unity to end violence against Maori women, told Mashable that social media is a powerful tool for building movement and education. He said that when Native communities are affected, Instagram can reach many people.

“George Floyd is sad, our Asian relatives are being attacked, and so on [which] It happened two years ago, and to this day, it is not that we can connect with each other, and love and love and love the families and those who have place, but I think it also activates people to want to do something, to say something. , repost and reshare on their pages and learn from each other,” Holgate said.

The act of activism seems to force some people to post, which is probably something we should look into.

“Some people are oppressed, especially the sadness is at the level of society. So for example, if we are sad with Breonna Taylor, if we are sad with George Floyd, you don’t talk about that disease and the impact of that disease. It’s up to you and our society and our culture, and then you question the correctness of your political situation,” said Patton. “I think on an individual level, it’s going to be very difficult, because it’s a question of sharing a lot with people who are looking for support in untrustworthy ways. Maybe you’re not in a relationship with the person who says you.”

Often, our social media posts immediately after a public incident are compared to what – and how – we posted before. If you didn’t report on public inequality before the death of George Floyd but are reporting now as if you were an expert, it’s not a lie and a fake, for the activists who have been able to work for many years. There may not be a perfect answer for what users should do in situations like this, but consistency is important; care is important in times of uncertainty; and bystander intervention is essential. Otherwise, you risk a knee-jerk reaction like The FBI mourns the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness haunts, dark trolls, and dark tourists

In a study published in May 2022 that looked at the commodification of darkness on Instagramauthor Crystal Abidin coined the term “depressing” to refer to the phenomenon in which everyday users and influencers engage in hashtags on social media about depression to “think to themselves or to hawk goods.”

There are also grieving groups, which attend memorial services and “try to stir things up,” Moore said. Grieving activists often look to public reminders of tragic events. And then there are the grief tourists, who Moore says are “people who go to memorial sites to see the funerals happening.” Depression tourists are involved in emotional resilience – they turn to see how others react to disasters. While most of us are guilty of narcissism, sad tourists are increasing this by contributing to the misery of others.

“Sometimes [grief tourists] they defend themselves and talk about, ‘Well, I’ve lost myself,’ or, ‘Oh, I’m sorry for your loss,’ but they’re not really crying,” Moore said. they just go inside to see what’s going on and see the emotional movement that other people are going through.”

On the other side is dark policing, when people try to control how others sound online.

“For example, [after] Kobe Bryant’s death has a lot of people on the internet saying, ‘You didn’t know him, so why are you so worked up about this and why are you upset about this?’ ” Moore said. “There’s this idea that if you don’t get too close to people [who has died] or if that person is not in your network or location, do not despair.”

But that kind of policing isn’t effective, Patton said, “because it doesn’t help us understand why this person was here in the first place.” And everyone has the right to offend people in general – our communities can be lost whether we know them or not.

“There needs to be an ecological and healthy place for people to grieve,” Patton said. “We need to think of these regions as places where people feel that they have a healthy place and save them from dark places. Our skill, our strength in these places.”

There is no manual for depression. There are no shortcuts to getting better or winning. But Instagram can be a tool to build community, and that’s probably what we need the most.