"All I do on this app is cry" : death, grief, and memorialisation content on TikTok

This dissertation examines death, grief, and memorialisation content on TikTok. Drawing on Michael Hviid Jacobsen’s theory of spectacular death as a diagnostic framework and Luciano Floridi’s information ethics as an evaluative framework, the study analyses a corpus of 132 TikTok items collected between April 2024 and January 2025 through purposive sampling. The analysis employs visual analysis, content analysis, and thematic analysis, supplemented by examination of comment sections as sites of collective negotiation around death, grief, and memorialisation content. Organised through three of Jacobsen’s dimensions of spectacular death (mediatisation, re-ritualisation, and commercialisation), the findings demonstrate that these dimensions are structurally inseparable on TikTok: a single piece of content simultaneously participates in all three. The dissertation theorises four conditions that characterise this convergence: death scrolling (the frictionless, algorithmically mediated encounter with death content), thanatological aesthetics (the visual and audio conventions through which death-related content achieves legibility), mortality publics (the ephemeral formations that coalesce when strangers are assembled around shared vulnerability), and commodification (the commercial extraction of value from all of the above). Through sustained application of Floridi’s information ethics, the dissertation argues that dignity violations, including consent violations, misrepresentations, and informational commodification, became possible where these four conditions meet. The platform forecloses the polytropic openness that Floridi identifies as constitutive of human dignity, risking harm to the informational bodies of the dead, and raises questions related to consent, agency, and the ethical stewardship of digital remains. The dissertation contributes conceptual vocabulary to death studies, platform studies, and information studies, particularly information ethics, and situates TikTok within a longer genealogy of digital memorialisation practices.