Grief in the Digital Age
Grief might be the oldest unifying experience for humans and really all beings throughout the history of the world. Over time, cultures adopted and evolved traditions to deal with death in a myriad of ways. However, the base experience has been essentially the same for the estimated hundreds of thousands of years we have inhabited the earth. Thinking about what has changed with grief over the last several hundred years, we begin to see technology affecting the process of grief. The primary one is the advent of photographs and video technology. This offered, for the first time, the ability to have a highly accurate likeness of the deceased. Allowing people to memorialize their loved ones in new ways. A photo slideshow of important moments of a person's life is now commonplace at any funeral, even for individuals passing away from old age; there are likely to be photographs from their youth. However, this feels in keeping with the death traditions that humans have kept since the beginning. Creating a grave with a marked tombstone or mausoleum allowed people to know where the physical body of their loved one rested, creating a physical place one could visit to feel in communion with them. Additionally, sculptures of likenesses can be found all across the world, indicating a desire to leave behind a version of oneself and a desire for people grieving to have an image of their loved one to interact with. The technology has evolved, but the impulse and result are the same across time.
With the rapid and intense leap that technology has made in the last 15 years, there are some new phenomena and aspects of the intersection of technology and grief that are emerging. To begin, research supports that technology has become more intertwined with loss and grief in an increasing number of ways (Cook, 2025). Death rituals have adapted to new technology that can look like memorial Facebook groups where users can share images and memories of the deceased or memorials planned through services like Partiful. Additionally, the resources individuals are seeking for support throughout their grief experience are increasingly facilitated by technology (Cook, 2025). Online grief cafes allow people to attend digitally based grief support-like groups at essentially any time. These could be connected to grief support institutions like the Christi Center in Austin, or they could be wholly online communities. The options for online community support with grief are many, as people can turn to Reddit pages, Discords, or groups on all the various social media platforms. These can be great resources for a variety of reasons, particularly in early grief, as it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for accessing community support. The various algorithms for the content delivery side of social media, and particularly TikTok, can funnel people towards content and communities centered around grief. This can provide access to others going through similar experiences, creating and sharing art or writing about grief. Or other content of people simply documenting their journey through grief.
Digital Ghosts
An unintentional byproduct of social media and modern technologies is the digital “ghosts” each of us leaves behind. The first time the author was introduced to this idea was the song Top Picks For You by Injury Reserve. This song is about the death of one of the members of the band, and the lyrics state:
“Grab the remote, pops up something you would’ve watched I’m like
Classic, this something I would’ve seen you watch
And then just laughed at
Your patterns are still in place and your algorithm is still in action
Just working so that you can just, jump right back in
But you ain’t jumping back”
This song explores this bizarre byproduct of the intersection of technology and grief. Active users of the internet, in general and especially social media, now leave behind digital profiles that are a fascinating time capsule of the individual. A person’s Instagram or Facebook profile is often a digital library they curated to document their life over time. For millennials and early Gen Z individuals, this could include pictures of them in middle school all the way up to their wedding day or other important adult experiences. If a person does not specify before their passing, this leaves family members with completely unique to our times decisions to make about what to do with these digital remnants. Some social media websites are adapting, with Facebook now allowing family members to take over the accounts of the deceased with the option to turn it into a digital memorial. A data study done by Oxford University estimated that by the year 2100, the number of user profiles on Facebook that belong to people who are deceased could number 4.9 billion (Öhman & Watson, 2019).
A more hidden layer of digital remnant that is left behind is the algorithms that are curated for users of social media. This can be thought of as the profiles connected to users on the social media website side. This includes the communities they were a part of, what sorts of content they found funny, and what types of media they were interested in. The song by Injury Reserve points out the tragic and dissonant way the algorithm is waiting for the deceased to “jump back in”.
Grief Bots and Continuing Bonds
The newest development in the intersection of grief and technology is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult to understand. It is easy to empathize with individuals who are reaching for this new possibility because it attempts to address one of the most prevalent desires associated with grief, the desire to speak with your loved one again.
Artificial intelligence has hit the mainstream, and while corporations are exploring how to squeeze the most profit possible out of it, many individuals are exploring how AI can be of use in their daily lives. Unfortunately, one of the biggest impacts of consumer use of AI is probably on high school and college students writing essays. However, there are many other prevalent or emerging uses of AI that are complex in their psychological and sociological implications. One is the use of AI to emulate the role of the therapist, which this blog may explore in detail in a later instalment. Another is the so-called “grief bots” that attempt to take on the personality of the deceased. This can allow individuals to feel like they are carrying on conversations with their loved ones. While the potential ramifications of this may be obvious from the outside looking in. It’s important to acknowledge how devastating and disorienting loss, especially sudden loss, can be.
An angle that is very interesting to analyze this from is the grief therapy concept of continuing bonds. The book Continuing Bonds by Silverman and Nickman outlines a preeminent theory in grief therapy that proposes that an important part of the grief experience is finding some form of ongoing connection with the deceased. This can take many forms, including engaging in related volunteer work, creating shrines or visiting a grave, writing letters, or many other rituals or day-to-day activities. The most relevant part is that some therapy modalities and some therapists will actually encourage a discussion of sorts with the deceased. This could take the form of a guided practice in a session of saying important things to the deceased internally. Including updating them on important life changes, saying things that were unsaid when they were alive, or just having a daily internal check-in. These practices allow someone to create an ongoing bond to the deceased that is supportive of their wellbeing and can allow the expression of important emotions. If this is standard practice in therapy, what is the fundamental difference between continuing bonds and speaking with a chatbot?
There is an emerging body of research related to grief, continuing bonds, and grief bots. It does not seem conclusive yet whether grief bots are helpful in establishing psychologically effective continuing bonds or if a relationship with grief bots is detrimental. The paper “Communing with the Dead Online: Chatbots, Grief, and Continuing Bonds” by Kruger and Osler argues that, despite the visceral negative reaction some may have at the thought of grief bots, they may ultimately be helpful to those who use them. They found that grief bots offered “thin reciprocity” that was treated with a fictionist stance by users. Meaning most users reported no confusion about the AI nature of the bot and were functionally using it as a way to engage in creating continuing bonds.
It seems to the author that the fundamental difference between the therapeutic conception of continuing bonds and the use of grief bots is the involvement of a third party. Continuing bond interventions in a therapeutic setting are fundamentally a one-person psychology. The inferred responses of the deceased are created by the individual and are therefore intertwined with the person's relevant thoughts and emotions related to the deceased and the particular stage of the grief journey a person is in. The effect of those imagined scenarios and conversations is highly emotionally resonant and can have profound effects. A grief bot appears to attempt to blur the line between an internal spiritual and psychological practice and an actual conversation with the other person. This could lead to memories of the deceased that were created by a large language model, which could be a significant complicating factor in the important milestones of the grief experience. This is conjecture, and further research will need to be conducted before any claims can be confirmed. However, this field of research is likely to expand as grief bots tantalizingly offer a highly desired opportunity to speak with a loved one who has passed.
Further Reading:
Öhman, C. J., & Watson, D. (2019). Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online. Big Data & Society, 6(1).
Cook, S (2025) Grief, choice and digital technology use: how bereaved people use digital technologies to support their grief
Anna Xygkou, Panote Siriaraya, Alexandra Covaci, Holly Gwen Prigerson, Robert Neimeyer, Chee Siang Ang, and Wan-Jou She. 2023. The "Conversation" about Loss: Understanding How Chatbot Technology was Used in Supporting People in Grief. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 646, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581154