Networked mourning: Appraising stranger mourning and dialogic healing on X

This study investigates the distinctive characteristics and underlying motivations of communication behaviours within social media posts belonging to deceased strangers. Taking posts on X about the death of #Christain Atsu, a Ghanian football star, who died in the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, as a case study, the study adopted a social networking and qualitative content analyses methods to develop close reading based on quantitative descriptions and topic clustering of text of more than 99,000 posts on X. In terms of mourning of #Christain Atsu, we grouped those that posted about his death into three categories: the Condolers and Grievers, the Venerators, and the Probers. The results indicate that social media, social culture, and individual actions collectively shape the interactions and norms related to dialogical healing. This study argues that when
mourning occurs, individuals have more reciprocal relationships on a dyadic level which decreases modularity of the network. The study advances the scholarship on networked and stranger mourning as well as dialogic healing.