Social Media Rituals

In 2016, the world mourned the loss of a number of famous people who had been of cultural significance across national and generational boundaries. Each of these deaths not only heralded intense affective and discursive activity on social media of the kind associated with public mourning, but they also enfolded ordinary users’ biographies into public expressions of memory, or provoked adjunctive conversations about other topics. To make sense of the patterns of mourning and memorialisation around these deaths, in this chapter we first establish a position on the uses of celebrity in popular culture. We revisit the literature on the cultural uses of celebrity, especially in everyday life. We trace the transformations of celebrity in digital culture, before focusing on celebrity deaths understood as media events, and proposing the idea of the social media ritual as a way to describe the communicative activity that surrounds these events. We focus particularly on the Twitter activity surrounding Bowie’s death, treating it as a paradigmatic example.