Datafication of mourning: Emotional labour, memory politics, and ethical innovation in digital grief technologies

This paper explores how digital technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain archives, and platform-specific memorial systems change the grieving phenomenon. It examines how datafication processes, which transform emotional labour into content that is managed by algorithms, also redefine grief expression and remembrance and bring up ethical issues of commodification, privacy, and consent. The discussion points out the historical continuities of mediated grief and how the traditional memorial artefacts were replaced by interactive digital settings and deals with the psychosocial consequences of long-term digital interaction with grieving. The most significant ones are ownership and control of digital legacies, being biased by an algorithm, the nature of representation and visibility, and the political aspects of collective mourning on the Internet. Relying on the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), the work promotes the use of interdisciplinary methods in attaching human-centred design, ethics, sociocultural understanding, and legal changes to prevent the exploitation and inequality of digital afterlife technologies by applying humanistic, ethical, sociocultural and legal values and concerns.