The development of digital technologies and online platforms entailed many changes and shifis in people’s lives. Many elements of culture once belonged exclusively to the offiine sphere, started to appear online as well. One of those phenomena is death. Now we can find numerous sites devoted to death, grieving, and loss. Death even “invaded” social networks, where it is actively discussed, in particular from the perspective of grief and bereavement. In the Armenian language Facebook, one can find a lot of posts related to death, most of which can be categorized as grieving posts.

First, Facebook serves as a new means to spread the news about death and upcoming funerals. It also helps people to continue their relations with deceased relatives. Many people talk to them directly in their posts, and it leaves the impression that the dead person can see or read the massage. Users can even tag the dead person and make his/her profile more apparent and accessible for the griever’s social network. Generally, grieving on Facebook is more interactive and intensive: one can post pictures, and videos of the deceased person, write some memories, or express some emotions related to his/her loss and receive comments from friends on Facebook.

Theoretically, digital or online grief has been considered more open, informal, emotional, and intensive than offiine. In social networks, people grieve more openly, because they don’t see each other, and formal rituals of mourning have been substituted by individuality and diversity of posts, where the shifi from actions to text and discourse took place. But while analyzing data from Armenian Facebook, I noticed that they don’t match with those theoretical positions – in my case grieving remains very formal, people did not express their emotions and thoughts as freely as in the case of English Facebook users, furthermore, people rather post much more about deaths of famous people than about their close relatives and loved ones.

To explain this difference between grief in Armenian Facebook and the main positions in the theory of online grief I will refer to historical stages of death and grief developed by Tony Walter. He suggests that traditional death was communal, but then comes the age of modernity, and death disappeared from public space. Grieving now is an individual and latent practice, but then in the period of postmodernity death returns to the public arena, but as an individual experience. When we look at the last developments in Armenian society and funeral culture, we notice that grieving remains traditional and formal on Facebook. Some 5 years ago, people organized funerals in their homes and mourned in the yards of multi-family residential. People don’t express their emotions and thoughts very openly on social networks but the same happens in funeral houses, which have been the main place for funerals in recent years. The grief in Armenian Facebook resembles the modern one in Western countries. But both these traditional and modern features of grief take place in a postmodern environment and condition – the digital age with online networks.