337 / 658
335
Saturday, November 12
0 9 : 0 0 – 1 0 : 3 0
PP 568
Communicating with the Dead: Media Practices of Continuing Bonds Among Bereaved Parents
K. Sandvik
1
, D. Refslund Christensen
2
1
University of Copenhagen, Media- Cognition and Communicatin, Copenhagen, Denmark
2
Aarhus University, Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus, Denmark
John Durham Peters argues that media as communicational tools not only enables dialogues with the living, but also with the dead. He argues that“every
new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts”; the recordings of people who have passed away fixed in photographs, sound tapes, film and in
all kinds of digitized formats for registering and archiving, thus overcoming time and space is a one of the “key existential facts about modern media”:
the possibilities for the living to interact with “the communicable traces of the dead” (Peters 1999:149). This argument will make a starting point for this
paper analyzing bereaved parent’communicational practices in order to create continuing bonds (Klass et.al. 1996) to their dead children. The use of media
and materialities ascribed with media qualities allows us to“deal with and come to terms with death without being dead ourselves”(Christensen & Sandvik
2014a: 1). However, we would like to broaden the scope of Durham Peter’s reflections, suggesting that the ways in which parents communicate to/with
the dead child are not just a matter of one-way speaking into the air but also a matter of two-way communication implying that the child has a presence
despite its absence. This paper focuses on how the loss of a child initiates processes, which – beyond the recognizable period of mourning – fruitfully might
be conceptualized as performing parenthood and as performing family. These processes are articulated through communicational practices in the shape
of everyday parental activities such as playing with the child, reading bedtime stories, celebrating birthdays or just bearing the dead child in mind, the pur‑
pose of which are to keep the dead child as a present part of the parents’and family’s continuing life. We argue that these practices are best understood as
parents’everyday practices relating to a child we have rather than to a child we had or a child we did not get. The child’s continuing existence and presence
is inscribed in everyday life through uses of digital media, physical objects working as media – even the parents own bodies when getting a memory tattoo.
Based on observation studies and qualitative contents analysis performed since 2008 on children’s graves and on online memorial sites (Christensen &
Sandvik 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a) and furthermore including interviews with bereaved parents (Christensen & Sandvik forthcoming), this paper argues
that bereaved parents communicational are more than anything about negotiating, (re)appropriating and performing parenthood.They may be understood
as ways in which bereaved parents perform acts of loving, caring and other parental conducts in order to maintain the significance of parenthood. They do
so in relation to themselves, to the dead child, to the child’s older or younger siblings and their family as such, to their peers or to their surroundings at large,
and they do this through a manifold (Couldry 2012) of intertwined and interacting media.
PP 569
How to Communicate Support? Supportive Communication in Private Online Counselling Conversations
M. Törrönen
1
, P. Isotalus
1
1
University of Tampere, School of Communication- Media and theatre CMT, Tampere, Finland
People increasingly seek help to their problems via mediated interpersonal discussions or private chats in internet counselling services. Previous studies
from face to face counselling show that it has many positive effects on wellbeing and coping. Online counselling effects is increasingly but less studied.
Online counselling conversations main objectives are to support, help and comfort support seekers and their needs in the private online conversations. In
this paper private online counselling conversations are examined from the viewpoint of supportive communication.Theoretical types of supportive commu‑
nication used in the study are emotional support, informational support and esteem support. Emotional support messages involve expressions of empathy
and encouragement. Informational support is characterized by messages that provide facts, guidance or advice. Advice appears to be more helpful when it
is an appropriate approach to the problem, when the content is useful and responds solving the problem. When advice followed a comforting message it
has evaluated more favorable than when the advice has given before such a message. Esteem support involves compliments and expressions of agreement
with a support seekers’ perspective (Goldsmith & MacGeorge 2000; Virtanen 2015). This paper objectives are 1) briefly review previous studies of online
counselling in the perspective of supportive communication, helping communication behavior, competent online counselling and mediated interpersonal
communication 2) to examine the types of supportive communication in the private helping online conversations between support providers and support
seekers. The method of this online counselling communication study is qualitative content analyses. I seek answers from the data with the questions:
How to communicate support? When and why specific types of support messages are more or less prevalent in this computer-mediated context? Results
of the collected conversational data will be explored more in detail in the presentation. The data of the paper will be collected during the 2016 from Finn‑
ish Evangelical Lutheran Church online counselling services, from the saved conversations in online chats and also from interviews of support providers.
Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church has 1400 trained voluntary and 600 professional employees in the church online counselling services. According to
previous studies I define online counselling as a behavioral health services or psychological interventions delivered over the internet, either synchronously
or asynchronously or as any delivery of mental and including but not limited to therapy, consultation and psychoeducation, by a practitioner to a client in
a non-face-to-face setting through distance communication technologies such as the telephone, asynchronous e-mail, synchronous chat, and videoconfer‑
encing (Dowling & Rickwood, 2014). According to previous studies support providers have difficulties to gather relevant background information and keep
the support seeker online during the chat. In support seekers point of view online chat brings many benefits for their crisis situations; for instance they are
free the barriers related to time and distance and they can keep anonymity in helping services. Online text based conversations characteristics are relatively
slow speed of chat and the lack of non-verbal cues which gives rather fast speed to get deeper level in the supportive conversation.