“I said to myself: ‘It’s not true, she’s not dead!'” Julie, who lost her mother a month ago, was devastated when she saw, shortly after her death, that her account Delivery courier was connected. “I was scared, it wasn’t normal,” he confesses to BFMTV.com.
But Julie quickly understood that it was her father who was still using her mother’s messaging system, in particular to exchange with some of his contacts and to organize the funeral. “I asked him not to call me again with my mother’s voice mail, she bothered me. It’s very disturbing.”
On the other hand, Julie appreciates the “footprints” of her mother in Facebook. A few days ago it was the birthday of the young woman who turned 36 years old. Some messages posted by her mother are put back on her thread. “Those who didn’t come back up, I went looking for them, I needed them, it makes me feel good.”
Reminder of the birthday date, notifications of memories, posts on the wall, identification or comments, photos: unless you change the Facebook account of a deceased person to a memorial page, nothing differentiates the social network of a living person from that of a dead person.
The latter could also soon become the majority: according to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute, by 2070, there will be more dead people’s Facebook accounts than living people.
For loved ones, it is an additional, virtual space in which to cry. The sociologist Hélène Bourdeloie, professor of information and communication sciences at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University, highlights that “by persevering, the traces left online by the dead can represent both a lever and a brake on this process,” she analyzes for BFMTV .com.
“The work shows that pain is sometimes alleviated, sometimes reinforced, depending on the context, the deceased in question, the age of the mourner, the way to mobilize the digital in the context of mourning.”
A source of comfort for Dolores, who had her husband’s Facebook codes before his death. So she decided to publish the announcement of her death on this same social network. “It allowed me to meet people she didn’t know but who liked me. It warmed my heart,” she tells BFMTV.com.
Olivier Dolat, who founded Eternel-le -a digital wealth management support service-, evokes the case of a woman who did not want to close the Linkedin account of her husband, who died ten years ago. . “She told me that it gave her a presence,” she explains to BFMTV.com.
Particularity of the digital: it introduces a disorder regarding the place and the status of the dead, considers the researcher Hélène Bourdeloie, who has worked on the uses of the digital within the framework of a process of mourning and survival of the traces of the dead. dead. “Sometimes she gives the illusion that the dead still belong to the world of the living, that they have a social existence that social media helps to make.”
Like the mourners who learn elements of life, personality characteristics or secrets of the deceased on social networks. “As if his identity was assumed by the surviving netizens who react.”
For this specialist in digital uses, social networks do represent an additional ordeal. “They are not a simple element of memory”, specifies Hélène Bourdeloie. “Given their technical characteristics in terms of ubiquity, multiplication and amplification of data, they completely undermine the relationship with mourning.”
If it was on Facebook that Marie* learned seven years ago of her brother’s death in a car accident, several hours before the official announcement, and that she “lived very badly” the first birthday notification reminder – “it was very painful , like a bad joke,” there’s no way she’s going to shut down her brother’s Facebook account.
It happens, however, that the social networks of the deceased end up becoming a real torture for the relatives. Olivier Dolat thus remembers a man who could not close the Facebook account of his late father. The various notifications and memories that came to him were unbearable: he ended up taking his father away from his friends.
“Social networks can sometimes represent the small stone in the shoe that takes on enormous proportions and constantly reminds us of the pain of loss,” Olivier Dolat further comments.
This is not the case of Marie-Noëlle, who regularly consults the Instagram page of her husband and father of her two children, who died two years ago. “I look at the photos of us that he had posted,” she testifies to BFMTV.com. “I want to keep something tangible from him.” She also continues to feed her Facebook page, which has been turned into a memorial account.
“On important dates I post little words, photos, it makes me feel good. It’s like going to the graveyard. But there, with the public dimension, I tell myself that his friends will think of him… And many times, later, they send me a little message “.
Recently, for her husband’s birthday, Marie-Noëlle’s sisters-in-law posted photos of him. “You can tell we haven’t forgotten him. A bit like we’re still communicating with him. And then I also think about my children, ways to keep memories for them.”
Martin Julier-Costes, a socioanthropologist at the University of Grenoble Alpes, thus considers that mourning is part of social networks today. “In the same way that some mourners continue to send messages to their deceased, to listen to the messaging announcement or to wear their clothes, it is a support to support and apprehend the unbearable,” analyzes T-It for BFMTV.com.
The researcher quotes these algorithms that imitate the way a missing person writes, giving the impression that you are chatting with them, EITHER these holograms of deceased people developed thanks to artificial intelligence. “Technology makes it possible to continue, in other ways, the link with the deceased person and to transform it,” adds Martin Julier-Costes, a specialist in funeral rites and mourning.
Which, according to him, enters the same register as material traces: managing the belongings, the mail or the apartment of the deceased, facing the place of the accident, repeating the walk we took with him or even falling into a song that reminds you of he.
“Digital spaces are places of mourning among others. There is nothing pathological about pursuing the link. Since the digital is part of our lives, it is not surprising that the dead are also there.
After the death of his 26-year-old daughter last November, Anouk decided to save all the messages exchanged with her. In total, there are thus more than 11,000 text messages that he has had printed in books. “I was afraid my phone would break, I didn’t want to lose them. I was very worried.”
He prints out his daughter’s messages, “the most beautiful thing” that could bring him comfort since her disappearance. From time to time, “when I have a stroke of sadness”, Anouk reads them again. “I remember everything like it was yesterday.”
Anouk is not the only one who has resorted to this type of support. Joachim Bigorre, who founded Mon livre SMS, a site that prints SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram conversations into books, says he is receiving more and more requests of this kind. “Originally, I started this project to print the lovers exchanges. But today, I have these kinds of orders almost every day.” Approximately 20% of his books refer to exchanges with deceased people.
Like other objects belonging to the deceased “that are bequeathed and can be fetishized with an emotional charge and a powerful memorial function,” says Hélène Bourdeloie, co-author of The impossible digital heritage: memory and traces. “Fingerprints linked to a deceased can be the object of worship.”
But saving messages, collecting photos or saving access codes to a social network to keep the dead alive, is it a cult? she wonders. For Hélène Bourdeloie, it is above all about “feeling that we are always connected with the dead”.
Source: BFM TV
