“Memories in the iCloud”: How does digital mourning transform traditional Chinese death memories?—A virtual ethnography based on China’s personal online mourning

Personalized digital mourning platforms are gaining increasing acceptance among the Chinese public. This study employs a mixed-methods approach combining virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore how digital mourning, as a novel form of mourning, influences death memory established upon traditional Chinese death rituals. The study finds that digital mourning platforms drive the digital transformation of traditional Chinese death rituals through three mechanisms: creating digital tombs, quantifying mourning rituals, and visualizing mourning emotions. However, this process blurs the boundaries between death-related mourning activities and daily life. The erosion of mourning sentiments by capitalist logic and the dissolution of death-mourning culture through performative rituals are gradually undermining the social foundations upon which traditional Chinese death memory is built. Currently, digital mourning is only gradually accepted by the Chinese public as a new form of traditional death commemoration. It has not fundamentally driven the modernization of traditional Chinese death rituals nor profoundly impacted traditional death-mourning ceremonies and death memories. Nevertheless, examining the digital transformation of death mourning reveals both its value in advancing the transformation of traditional Chinese death memory and the endogenous crises it triggers. This holds significant practical implications for China, a society undergoing deep aging, in promoting modern funeral reforms and implementing cultural transformation.