difference? Aside from sensory details, can placing a digital rose on a virtual memorial truly be said to be different than placing a real one on a gravesite when both are symbolic gestures?

The form of death-related posting practices suggests an important dimension of how users imagine the afterlife, namely that the deceased may be able to receive electronic communications from the living.

The social media platforms used to communicate between friends can become, after the death of a participant, spaces for direct “communication” to the deceased through the same channels that individual had used while alive—moving the memorial site from a distant graveyard into the midst of life.

Brubaker and Hayes note that direct messages usually are directed to the deceased, not, as one might expect, to co-mourners.19

the essence of a photograph is death. Because a photograph does not change whether its subject is living or dead, it is in a way an inherently posthumous

“Memorializing” a profile.

In contrast, social network sites may connect those who remember the dead, while grieving and beyond.

“There is nothing that is sacred in itself, only things sacred in relation,”31 we can infer that while Facebook is not inherently sacred, users can make it so—or at least sanctify an individual’s page—simply by treating it or relating to it as such.

The Living Headstone, for example, attaches or engraves a QR code to a headstone, which is then readable by smartphone and connected to a unique, personalized online memorial page. This digital space is “similar to a personal Facebook page,” where, a “Living Headstone” archive site contains information you and friends can add about your loved one,