Death and mourning were largely considered private matters in the 20th century, with the public remembrances common in previous eras replaced by intimate gatherings behind closed doors in funeral parlors and family homes. But social media is redefining how people grieve, and Twitter in particular -- with its ephemeral mix of rapid-fire broadcast and personal expression -- is widening the conversation around death and mourning, two University of Washington sociologists say. 

In a paper being presented at Aug. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle, UW doctoral students Nina Cesare and Jennifer Branstad analyzed the feeds of deceased Twitter users and found that people use the site to acknowledge death in a blend of public and private behavior that differs from how it is addressed on other social media sites.

While posts about death on Facebook, for example, tend to be more personal and involve people who knew the deceased, Cesare and Branstad say, Twitter users may not know the dead person, tend to tweet both personal and general comments about the deceased, and sometimes tie the death to broader social issues -- for example, mental illness or suicide.

"It's bringing strangers together in this space to share common concerns and open up conversations about death in a way that is really unique, " Cesare said.

The researchers used mydeathspace.com, a website that links social media pages of dead people to their online obituaries, to find deceased Twitter users. They sorted through almost 21,000 obituaries and identified 39 dead people with Twitter accounts (the vast majority of entries are linked to or MySpace profiles). The most common known causes of death among people in the sample were, in order, suicides, automobile accidents and shootings.

Cesare and Branstad pored over the 39 feeds to see how users tweeted about the deceased, and concluded that Twitter was used "to discuss, debate and even canonize or condemn" them.