Description
For centuries, a letter was used to carry its writer across the miles to its recipient. It was a way to communicate one's thoughts and feelings when circumstances didn't allow for intimate engagement and conversation. Since 2004, Facebook has been used in a similar fashion, changing the way people communicate with one another, bridging space and obstacles to allow for intimacy and connections that even intimate letters didn't enable. Of course, since its creation, there have been Facebook users with established profiles who have passed away. As a result, their profiles, pictures, timelines, and Facebook "walls" remain active. Oftentimes, their pages become a place for loved ones to grieve, share stories, and comfort one other. They are also a place for the grieving to "communicate" with the deceased, posting letters of varying lengths to their friend or family member who has passed. In this way, the posts, and responses to those posts, constitute a kind of epistolary text, satisfying the characteristic of epistolary texts as letters between absent friends. Further, these posts and their responses have offered a unique opportunity to analyze the ethical and pathetic appeals present in these posts, to understand how "friends" of the deceased perceive posted pictures of other "friends" with the deceased or shared stories of firsthand experiences that the user and the deceased have had together, and how those additions may contribute to the user's credibility. There is a growing area of inquiry in psychological and sociological research that looks at the memorial pages as a way to analyze the behaviors of those who post on them. Many of these researchers argue that Facebook memorial pages serve as a way for grieving loved ones to find healing Others counter that the permanence of the deceased's identity in this online space can hinder the grieving process for the Facebook friends who visit the page and interact with the deceased. Despite the prevalence of this method of communication, there is little research focusing on the rhetorical analysis of Facebook memorial pages, specifically on the similarities between traditional epistolary texts and the posts and responses on the Facebook "wall." This study will employ a generative rhetorical analysis of Facebook memorial pages to show the similarities that the posts and responses share with epistles and to demonstrate that their purposes are similar: they both are meant as a way for one to communicate with an absent friend and to communicate with an even broader audience than the addressed recipient of the letter. While Facebook memorial pages share characteristics consistent with epistolary rhetoric, it was this letter-writing tradition that combined with the modern practice of sharing one's life publicly through social media before a virtual audience that paved the way for public bereavement. In addition, the effect of the post on the audience, depending on what information, image, or text is attached to the post, will exhibit the rhetorical appeals of ethos and pathos that reside in this genre and can either contribute or detract from the overall message or the user's credibility, characteristics that align with epideictic rhetorical practices. Traditionalists may lament the loss of a longstanding tradition of correspondence via the letter; however, my analysis will show that this tradition is not being rendered obsolete by the advent of digital correspondence. Rather, it is continuing on through social networking communication.
