How is digitisation changing grieving?
REPORT
1 Jun 2021
How is digitisation changing grieving?

As mortality rates rose in 2020, lockdown measures forced people around the world to mourn their loved ones via social media and video calls. Yet while some may have felt this hindered their ability to process their loss, why might digital grieving remain commonplace post-pandemic?

Michael Weightman

Michael Weightman is an organiser and session host for The New Normal, an online social platform where people discuss and work through their grief.

Dr. John Troyer

Dr. John Troyer is the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices and architectural design, postmortem bioethics, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. He is also a theatre director, installation artist, and the co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website and the Future Cemetery Project.

Freddie Mason

Dr.Freddie Mason received his doctorate from the Royal College of Art in 2019, where he researched the history and futures of viscosity and viscous materiality. The fruits of this work formed a book, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (New York: Punctum Books 2020). He regularly gives talks, teaches, writes and makes films on matters related and unrelated to his material specialisms. He is currently working on a new book about the history of texture in food and art.