Funeral Decorum in the Age of Social Media

M ost would agree that how a person grieves is deeply personal. Yet when Jayne Rivera, a 20-year-old social-media influencer in Florida, posted sexy and smiley pictures of herself at her father’s funeral — posing in a little black dress in front of his open casket — the response online was largely revulsion. Instagram disabled her account “with no reason given.” Over 1,000 of her followers immediately stopped subscribing. Local news media picked up the controversy. Rivera couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. In one sense, I can’t say I blame her. Why should we find her actions shocking or even objectionable when the cheapening of life’s more intimate moments on social media is now par for the course?

 “Everyone handles the loss of a loved one in their own ways,” Rivera told NBC News after the controversy surrounding her funeral photo shoot. “Some are more traditional while others might come across as taboo. For me, I treated the celebration as if my father was right next to me, posing for the camera as he had done on many occasions prior.”

Her argument is broadly consistent with prevailing social standards. Funerals may be the earliest form of religious practice, but secularization means that nowadays, most of the emphasis is on memorializing the deceased’s life. Since Rivera conceived of this as merely a celebration and not a religious rite, why shouldn’t she put her own spin on things? The answer can be difficult to put into words. What it turns on, though, is that such thinking upsets some of our deepest customs, traditions, and prejudices — “the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life,” as described by Roger Scruton. Human beings have taken seriously the burying of their dead for thousands of years. Living for and through social media may have influence, especially among the young, but its vapidness can also be self-evident and unfulfilling.

Young women such as Rivera are often products of their environment. As well as being “a fitness and fashion influencer,” Rivera is a model on OnlyFans — the subscriber-based content service with a reputation for soft porn. Its models are essentially strippers for the digital age. Some of these young women begin their careers there by posting suggestive pictures of themselves on Instagram, which is where they discover the potential for monetizing their bodies.

Take Instagram, whose own research shows that its platform worsens mental-health outcomes for its female users. In a recent report, the Wall Street Journal quoted these Instagram researchers as saying that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse”; “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”; and “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.” And yet, the incentive for using platforms to showcase bodily allure is clearly validation — posting sexually provocative pictures invites regular engagement and generally positive feedback.

Even people who are content with themselves can fall into the same trap of performative validation-seeking. Couples pose, oftentimes in a very contrived manner, to capture (then share widely) the precise moment of their engagement. TheKnot.com even recommends “the best engagement captions for your Instagram announcement.” When someone famous experiences a tragedy, the standard press release (“we ask you to respect our privacy at this time”) is now less fashionable than baring one’s soul in a long and unedited social-media post. Never mind relishing a moment or relying on the comfort and company of loved ones; the modern instinct is to tell all to a vast social network of acquaintances and complete strangers.

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Rivera’s grief. At a painful moment, she resorted to a common method of self-soothing. Only in doing so, she inadvertently nicked a cultural tripwire — funeral decorum, a custom we can all agree is worth preserving.