Networked Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sharing Loss Online

The growing body of research into practices of loss online (Willerslev & Christensen, 2013; Christensen & Gotved, 2015) has brought to the fore some of the key sociocultural implications of the remediation of loss, including for instance the revival of public mourning (Walter, 2008), the creation of new communal spaces for the performance and sharing of emotion (Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, & Pitsillides, 2011) and the increased affordances for mourners’ identity and affective performances (Giaxoglou, 2015). However, the wider contribution of studies in this area to theorizations of networked emotions in digital cultures of participation and sharing has not been sufficiently emphasized in individual articles or published collections so far. The special issue seeks to fill this gap, calling for the extension of the study of emotion from the domains of everyday life (Gross, 2008), culture (Ahmed, 2004), and mass media (Döveling et al., 2011) to virtual online environments (Döveling, 2015) which are implicated in wider transformations of social and cultural practices. The articles selected for inclusion in this special issue collectively provide an interdisciplinary and intercultural lens to emotional communication in mediatized contexts of grieving, mourning, and memorialization and contribute to the understanding of the reflexive and social dynamics of sharing emotions online.