Does social media silence grief?

On tragedy and sadness in the age of Twitter and Facebook

An airplane.
(Image credit: Illustrated | oleksii arseniuk/iStock, Apple)

When Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 was shot out of the sky this month, and all 176 people on board perished, my social media feeds initially carried on as if everything were quite normal. Despite the awful tragedy, there were the usual jokes, the squabbling, the self-promotion. It felt eerie, strange, surreal, as if all that death didn't matter.

It's not that I am unaware of this tendency online. It is loosely part of what scholars refer to as context collapse: the flattening of a whole variety of audiences and ways of speaking into one, unified stream. In this case, it seems people I saw online felt this disaster was just another awful thing happening in a faraway land, and thus carried on with their day. I've seen it happen hundreds of times before.

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Navneet Alang

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based out of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt.