“Saying ‘I Love you’ With Icons”: Imagined Communication and the Relational Production of Digital Offerings

This paper explores the motivations, ritual practices, and cultural meanings of digital offerings on Chinese virtual memorials. Drawing on four years of online observation, auto-ethnography, and in-depth interviews, it finds digital offerings feature distinctive persistence, traceability, networked circulation and personalization. These affordances reshape mourning into an individualized, frequent, and flexible mediated practice, foregrounding mourner ’ s agency. Their circulation transforms private grief into a networked relational practice that challenges the utilitarian logic of traditional rituals. In this process, digital offerings and virtual memorials function as collective coping mechanisms, enabling bereaved parents to form affective communities grounded in shared trauma. Meanwhile, they are embedded in the digital economy of symbolic goods, producing intersections between emotional expression, affective labor, and commercial logics. Overall, as a mediated relational practice, digital offerings facilitate self-healing and filial piety while fostering connective mourning and social support networks, offering new possibilities for emotional communication and relationship building in China.