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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Anthropology

The University of San Francisco

2020

Weibo

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Placing Notes In The Virtual “Western Wall”: Online Memorial Culture In Chinese Social Media, Xiaoyu Zhang May 2020

Placing Notes In The Virtual “Western Wall”: Online Memorial Culture In Chinese Social Media, Xiaoyu Zhang

Master's Projects and Capstones

Each society has a unique way of understanding death and coping with mourning. The increasing online mourners in China gradually generated a collective reference to the Weibo account that belongs to the dead, the “Western Wall.” This project searches for answers to two questions: 1) What characterizes Chinese online memorial practice? And how do these practices compare with those in the Western countries? 2) What aspects of Chinese culture and social conditions can explain Chinese online memorial practices? By combining corpus analysis with thematic analysis on 1,606 comments left on the last tweet of two accounts of deceased Weibo users, …