Event Title
The Future of Comfort is Open : Digital Communities as Spaces to Cope with Loss (Panel B)
Location
Room 409, South Hall
Start Date
30-9-2016 10:15 AM
End Date
30-9-2016 11:45 AM
Description
Since the 1990s, and especially since the advent of Web 2.0 empowered users around the globe to begin constructing uniquely digital communities, much study has been devoted to the impact of this specific kind of community-building on youth. Teenagers, especially, have been the focus both of the popular and academic gaze, as they seek to traverse their rapidly changing world through, increasingly, a tiny handheld screen as opposed to a glossy magazine or a television. However, significantly fewer studies have been done on the adults one generation prior. Yet it is this cohort currently navigating, online, their own adult mazes of relationships, parenting, and--frequently, given the precipitous aging of their parents' generation--loss. Even as such adults worry about the overly-digitized future of their own offspring, they are reaching out across communities their generation helped to create, in order to seek connection and comfort via the very medium pilloried as the polar opposite to both. This paper will analyze the ways in which digital communities serve as ad hoc places to process grief across generational, geographic and cultural boundaries formerly thought to necessitate the localization of loss.
The Future of Comfort is Open : Digital Communities as Spaces to Cope with Loss (Panel B)
Room 409, South Hall
Since the 1990s, and especially since the advent of Web 2.0 empowered users around the globe to begin constructing uniquely digital communities, much study has been devoted to the impact of this specific kind of community-building on youth. Teenagers, especially, have been the focus both of the popular and academic gaze, as they seek to traverse their rapidly changing world through, increasingly, a tiny handheld screen as opposed to a glossy magazine or a television. However, significantly fewer studies have been done on the adults one generation prior. Yet it is this cohort currently navigating, online, their own adult mazes of relationships, parenting, and--frequently, given the precipitous aging of their parents' generation--loss. Even as such adults worry about the overly-digitized future of their own offspring, they are reaching out across communities their generation helped to create, in order to seek connection and comfort via the very medium pilloried as the polar opposite to both. This paper will analyze the ways in which digital communities serve as ad hoc places to process grief across generational, geographic and cultural boundaries formerly thought to necessitate the localization of loss.