Online Condolences: An Ethnographic Analysis of User Discourse on the Facebook Pages of Portuguese Funeral Directors

This article examines the condolence discourse of users responding to obituaries posted by local Portuguese funeral parlours on Facebook. Aiming to explore mourning discourse and identify online community dynamics that interact with the physical community surrounding the funeral parlour, we adopted a methodology combining principles of critical discourse analysis and ethnography. The findings reveal several notable aspects: the spaces were marked by informality, evident in the prevalence of misspellings and grammatical errors, the use of pictographic elements (e.g., emojis), and the recurrence of users posting identical comments across posts regardless of the deceased. These spaces also prompted discursive contrasts, ranging from seemingly inappropriate interactions to heartfelt comments sharing personal experiences of grief. Furthermore, they served as venues for remembering, characterising, and imagining the deceased, often through narratives of shared experiences. This discursive diversity is argued to be facilitated by Facebook’s integration into everyday life and its mediated nature. Coupled with an apparent lack of emotional literacy in the digital context, this appears to relieve certain users of responsibility in the discourse produced.