In 1969, psychiatrist and near-death studies pioneer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross defined what she called the five stages of grief in her book “On Death and Dying,” taken from her observations of terminally ill patients processing their impending deaths. The Kübler-Ross model initially extrapolated these experiences from the patients, then extended it to those who processed their loss. Today, loss and grief fill our social media feeds, often following the same patterns. We will apply these patterns in a general framework before elaborating on specific examples. Above all, I hope this can help.
Stage One: Denial
“A conscious or unconscious decision to refuse to admit that something is true. Several forms of denial exist, including denial of fact, impact, awareness, cycle and denial.”
Moments after a tragedy, social media is usually rife with misinformation. With tensions high, denial of or apathy toward the truth can be appealing when reported information is scarce. These denials can twist, obfuscate and even reconstruct the truth of a tragedy at the whims of ideology, including those that are counterproductive to preventing further tragedies. Even further, some denials of the truth seek to contradict tragedy; they deny that the event is a tragedy at all.
Stage Two: Anger
“An emotional or physical act in which the patient attempts to place blame.”
Much of social media activism is infused with anger. Anger that arises from injustice is found to motivate a lot of activism, online or not. Queer Kazakhstani activist Zhanar Sekerbayeva cites anger as her driving force, saying “my activism isn’t motivated by kindness. It’s motivated by anger … My government makes me angry. The police force makes me angry. Homophobia makes me angry … but anger keeps me going. When I talk about a topic that angers me I can’t stop. Anger is my sister.” This anger is also evident in the calls to action some activists make to others on social media who they view as apathetic.
This contention comes from social media giving every individual a platform for self-expression. If a user doesn’t take advantage of their ability to forward social consciousness in some way, it poses this question: Does an individual’s right to curate their online experience truly outweigh the potential to mitigate suffering through the activist actions — educating, sharing donation links, challenging harmful rhetoric — that individual can take? For some, priority is their own experience and the needs of their mental and physical health. For others, the priority is whatever action can be taken for oppressed groups, even resorting to sharing graphic imagery and descriptions of the tragedies.
However, there is a crucial issue with how anger fuels social activism online. Social media sites use anger and algorithmic radicalization to keep their users in a cycle of rage-fueled online interactions. Algorithms prioritize content that a user is more likely to respond to, and this includes content that invites controversy, no matter how harmful its rhetoric might be. This drives up engagement for these apps and therefore drives up profits for the companies that own them. We observe another dichotomy here: a balancing act of using these apps as platforms for praxis by activists and for profit by the companies that are then directly profiting from these tragedies.
Stage Three: Bargaining
“A negotiative process in which patients attempt to postpone or distance themselves from the reality of a situation.”
Bargaining occurs in mental deals made with oneself or higher powers; it is the rethinking process that occurs when evaluating the personal, political and public failures that lead to the tragedies social media activism contends with. The bargaining is turned inward as social activism plays a role in many individuals’ self-actualization. These self-actualizing mindsets are often applied externally in conscious consumption, especially in tragedies that occur globally. Boycotting corporations complicit in such tragedies is a concrete action — this extends to some boycotting social media corporations involved.
These specific, external actions then also include other actions taken to prevent further losses — like protests and pressures on public offices. However, there’s an issue that arises with the former method of social consciousness when self-actualization comes up in the digital sphere. Nearly every act of online activism — whether it be a comment, a post or any other interaction — carries with it a response metric: “likes,” “shares,” etc. These metrics transform social consciousness as self-actualization into social currency, one that can psychologically influence users to, again, continue engaging with apps that bolster the parent companies’ profits.
Stage Four: Depression
“A feeling of loss or control or hopelessness with a situation.”
Activism turns to exhaustion. The overwhelming amount of information that the internet provides brings with it an overwhelming amount of activist burnout, a feeling that the injustices of this world are too numerous to combat. Taking the tragedies of the world on one’s shoulders makes them inevitably sink. On social media, the process that creates this hopelessness is so well-known it’s been termed “doomscrolling.” Social media scrolling itself has been analyzed as an addictive practice, so to link it with depression, hopelessness and doom, it again creates a profitable practice for social media companies at the cost of the user.
Stage Five:
The fifth and final stage of grief is acceptance. And we, of course, observe this in action: The media cycle turns its wheel, posts about a topic slowly drop in frequency and people move on. People accept the loss, and they accept that tragedies will happen again.
But how can that be?
How can we accept the cycle of injustice?
How are we meant to accept the inevitability of events like wars, police brutality, mass shootings, climate disasters, genocide and every other tragedy that occurs due to the failures of the political powers that govern this world — especially when it’s the corporate powers behind them that profit, including the ones that monetize the engagement resulting from the online activism surrounding these tragedies? I don’t think we can.
Stage Six: Finding Meaning
In 2004, Kübler-Ross worked with thanatologist David Kessler to write a follow-up book titled “On Grief and Grieving,” where the two asserted that these stages were non-linear, highly amorphous and adaptive human responses to grief. In 2019, Kessler posited his own final stage in “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief,” writing this: “Meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.”
The injustices I have touched on here are so tragic precisely because they cannot be “simply what happens.” Injustice is not inevitable; it is enacted. In the present condition, we are faced with tragedy and loss on such an overwhelming, international scale that it seems inevitable to sink into its depressive results and turn away from it entirely — but I would ask you, please, to keep moving forward and to give that loss meaning.
I ask you to find your anger, your self-actualization and your love for your fellow humans; I ask you to make meaning of it with any activism that you are able, online or not. And for the digital realm, we must understand that we have to make use of every tool at our disposal more than they can make use of us — for praxis, for organizing, for fundraising — even in the face of their systematic suppression, with the consequences of contributing to genocide that their short-sightedness comes with.
Especially for those directly connected to its source, grief is abundant in the wake of tragedy, even omnipresent. Mourning manifests in countless forms, and I hope that what you have read here can help you understand that online activism is a productive, meaningful form of that mourning — even with its caveats. Even in tragedy, however, polarization occurs. Those grieving split themselves across ideological gaps. We know how grief functions, so what we need to interrogate further is not the grief of those mourning, but the ideologies which use that grief.
These actions are even more crucial in the wake of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, where in the absence of effective, ethical journalism in Western news media, the responsibility of reporting the truth of this tragedy has now fallen on those in Gaza with social media and the users who respond.
With that said, I want to conclude this examination on grief with the full statement made Oct. 13, 2023 (with the information at that time) by Jewish-American online essayist Henry “Little Joel” — and ask you to give meaning to the martyrs.
“I would like to grieve for the 1300 Israelis who were killed. I think their deaths were pointless, and sad, and I hate thinking about them — but I can’t. I can’t grieve, not really. Neither can you. How can we grieve the death of 1300 Jews when they are used as a justification to destroy a people? How can we grieve when Israel has ordered the evacuation of North Gaza — 1.1 million people — an act which will have devastating consequences, which according to the Red Cross, is illegal under international law? How can we grieve when Netanyahu supported Hamas, saw them as an important instrument in the division of Palestine? How can we grieve when so many Palestinians have been killed before, pointlessly, tragically? No, in its apartheid and its cruelty, Israel has taken away even grief — and what a great tragedy that is.”
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.
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