Recently, news of an unexpected death percolated through my social network. I didn’t know the deceased directly, but many people I’m close to did, and I felt how hard they were hit.
Since many of those closest to the deceased lived in different parts of the country, and most of them were active Facebook users, it was natural that Facebook would become one of the sites where they came to grieve together. Through wall posts and comment threads (in addition to phone calls and emails) they expressed sympathies, consoled one another, shared photos, memories and even coordinated the practical details of dying, such as who was picking up whom from the airport, how the deceased’s remains were being prepared, and who couldn’t make it to the memorial service.
In some ways, Facebook turned out to be an effective medium for bringing people together during a difficult time. I’m sure that many were glad to be able to reach out to one another so easily to offer comfort and draw strength. But I believe that Facebook actually failed my friends in a few crucial ways.
One way that became obvious to me, a relative outsider, was how public Facebook made every detail of communal grieving. Facebook’s “Top News” feed presents content to users based on how active that piece of content is: how many times a post gets commented on, and who comments on it, etc. The algorithm that floats a thread to the top of my feed doesn’t have a clue what the thread is about. In this situation, that meant that conversations of a very private and personal nature among a close-knit group of friends and family were essentially broadcast to huge swaths of their Facebook social networks. Those however many of us who were on the periphery of this tragedy, who were 1st or 2nd-degree connections to some number of the central participants, were pushed by Facebook to peer in on a group of people who were deep in grief. There wasn’t an easy, graceful way for either the bystanders or the grief-stricken separate themselves without making permanent changes to our privacy settings. The grievers couldn’t easily step to the side and communicate more privately without losing out on the crucial features of Facebook that allowed them to make contact, communicate and feel close and connected with one another. And the sympathizers couldn’t comfortably express our sympathy without feeling like we were intruding.
This situation got me thinking of ways that people manage these kinds of free-flowing public/private boundaries in real life. Since I was already thinking about grief and death, the concept of a hospital curtain (the kind on runners around a hospital bed) came to mind. Hospital curtains offer a graceful, if imperfect, solution to the problem of privacy in hospitals, which are ultimately public spaces where it’s seldom feasible (and often inadvisable) to put up solid barriers. Hospital curtains allow people to signal a need for privacy to outsiders, and to create a temporary social space for intimate talk with friends or loved ones in need. But hospital curtains are porous barriers: they don’t completely shut off the inside from the outside, allowing doctors and nurses to enter and leave as necessary and even allowing late-arrivals (a patient’s friend who is arriving to visiting hours late) to comfortably slip in.
Hospital curtains don’t block sight or sound completely, but they soften them enough that both the people inside and the people outside can feel a little more comfortable about their privacy and can focus on what matters to them. And like an office door*, a partially open curtain can be used to indicate something different than a fully closed one (come in if you want to visit vs. give us a minute, would you?) They construct a temporary private shelter in the middle of a bustling public place, one that can be adapted moment-by-moment and rolled away when you’re finished.
But how do you duplicate the crucial, socially meaningful features of this simple device online? How do you draw a temporary, translucent curtain around a comment thread? How do you provide passersby with basic, necessary cues about what’s going on, who’s involved and whose presence would be welcomed (or not welcomed) without giving away everything? How do you create a visibly private space for private conversation inside a public place? How do you send the message that’s sent by a drawn curtain around a patient’s bed with a murmur of voices inside: you’re welcome to come in, he’d love to see you. But he needs his rest, so we probably shouldn’t stay long.
This idea of visibly private places happens all around us, not just in hospitals or times of communal grief. Hallway huddles are another example: those spontaneous eddies of people that coalesce around a conversation topic in the flow of a public hallway. A passerby on approach can tell a lot about a hallway huddle before their even in earshot: they can tell whether they recognize the participants. They can tell something about the nature of the conversation by tone of voice or body language.They might even be able to suss out whether or not they would be a welcome addition to the gathering from a furtive glance or a friendly wave from one of the huddlers.
It’s hard to huddle in the hallways of Facebook. Interactions there are usually either all public (posts and threads) or all private (IM and group pages). If there’s conversation happening, you either see it or you don’t. There’s no easy way to walk over for a closer look, or to sit on the other side of the room to give the participants “some space.”
The internet can support these kinds of private spaces, although they take a little more work up front. To take another example of communal grief (I guess I’m feeling maudlin today?), a few years ago a professor and mentor of mine died, again quite unexpectedly. She was young, and had meant a lot to a lot of people, but most of us had moved on since college, as she had, and we weren’t aware she’d passed. So her family created a WordPress blog dedicated to her memory, and asked visitors to the site to share their anecdotes and experiences in the comment thread. They propagated news of her passing through various social media channels (Facebook among them) and through the college alumni office, including a link to the blog. I found out the same way I suspect most of us did: from a friend’s post on Facebook.
Many, many of us went to the blog site and shared memories of our teacher and mentor on the comment board. Dozens of comments poured in. Reading the board moved me, made me cry, made me glad to have known her and glad to know that she’d had such an impact on so many people. I felt connected, and was able to deal with her death better than I would have otherwise. The blog was as good a “grieving place” as we could get, distributed as we were.
Of course, opening up a place like that to anyone who passes by can be dangerous on the internet. The widely-publicized trolling of the Facebook memorial page of Alexis Pilkington is a prime example. By contrast, it’s much harder for hordes of Anonyous angries to pour storm a wake or a business meeting. But these are edge cases: the real downside of having to construct a new permanent place every time you want to have a visibly private gathering is that it can no longer be impromptu. The space requires infrastructure, maintenance and monitoring. You can’t leave the curtain halfway open, close it for a few minutes, and then roll it back completely when you leave.
There are opportunties for design here, but it’s the kind of design that’s hard to do up-front. You have to allow the users to design and redesign their spaces on the fly, to suit their own needs as they arise.*
Social media can be socially meaningful. It’s happening all around us. But it’s time for the next step: our online spaces for interaction have to support impromptu gatherings, side conversations and shared moments as well as they support broadcast emoting, cross-talk and public displays of affection. Less frat party, more cocktail party.
*The geek in me suggests a reading of Harrison & Dourish’s (1996) “Re-placeing Space: The Role of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems.” But I’m preparing for a PhD general exam, so you should take all my reading recommendations with a grain of salt. And probably a shot of tequila.
