Research On The Mourning Behavior And The Construction Of Collective Memory In Social Media

The development of digital technology and social media has allowed the private and individualized death and mourning step into the public space.For example,the death of a public figure often triggers collective memorial actions in social media and becomes a mourning event.Netizens express their grief and write memories together,which has not only changed the traditional medium of memory writing,but also jointly constructed a collective memory of public figures.When social media represented by WeChat and Weibo has become a new medium for public memory writing,what changes will occure to the traditional memory construction mechanism? Specifically,the memory practice in social media has enhanced the classic problems of memory research in the past face a new situation that needs to be re-examined.These questions include: Who is remembering?Remember what? Why and how.This research takes the event of mourning for Mr.Jin Yong in social media as a case,and uses the method of combining text analysis and in-depth interviews to investigate how netizens in social media construct collective memories through mourning.Through analysing the text of Weibo and WeChat's discourse practice in memory of Jin Yong,explain the performance and characteristics of the following three core issues of memory research including the main body of memory,the content of memory",and the way of memory in the social media era and respond to the following questions like why to remember also function of memory through in-depth interviews with the subject of the article.The thesis consists of seven parts.The first part is the introduction,explaining the origin of the research,the significance of the research,sorting out the core concepts,raising questions,and the research methods;the second part is a literature review;from the third to the sixth parts are the main parts of the thesis.By taking the case that netizens moron Mr.Jin Yong from Wei Bo and WeChat,we analyze how social media build collective memory from the subject of memory,the content of memory,the way of memory,and the function of memory.The seventh part is the conclusion and reflection.The main findings of the research are: From the perspective of the mourners,we find that the power of collective memory construction in social media is gradually approaching to the public.Although media organizations dominate the framework and emotional tone of memory construction,from the perspective of quantitative,the individual's right of speaking out has been released.from the perspective of the content of memory,it not only include the construction of collective memory of Jin Yong himself,but also include the concluding and thinking of individual memories.From the perspective of the function of memory,netizens' memory of Jin Yong ultimately points to the three functions of collective memory: reflection(era and social phenomenon),self-recognition,and construction of collective identity.From the perspective of the memory process,the collective memory of social media follows the path from "triggering memories" to "reshaping memories".It is affected by media technology and the characteristics of the times,and the triggering of memories is affected by the "twolevel trigger mechanism",that is,individual memory.The trigger of self memory is not only based on the memory of the subject of the media event(Jin Yong),but also based on the memory of the writer's social network,showing the importance of individual social networks in the construction of collective memory,realizing the interaction between online and offline,individual memory and collective memory and cross-platform media.Finally,our further analyse combined with the concept of media events shows that in the era of social media,the relationship between media events and the construction of collective memory is not a one-way time sequence as traditionally thought,but a two-way synchronic view,which responds to the current academic research hypothesis on media events.