Grief Porn - Couldn't have said it better myself (SFW)

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Right now, in a place you've never visited, a person you'll never know is dying. If he's dying in a particularly devastating way—and, more importantly, if he is leaving behind shareable content—it is possible that millions of strangers will mourn his or her death tomorrow. Why?
Last week, there is a good chance that Facebook served up to you a Buzzfeed post entitled "A Father Sings To His Dying Newborn Son After His Wife Dies Following Childbirth." Below the site's iconic yellow buttons—"LOL," "win," "omg," "cute"—sits, indeed, a video of a father singing to his dying newborn son after his wife died following childbirth. As the incubator hums and clicks, you can, if you want, watch a man in anguish sing for the end of his small family. In a tab next to Gmail, you can watch his helpless son die.

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This is by design, of course. On a crowded social internet that places a premium on generating outsized emotion and intense reaction, these stories are as close as a content producer can get to a guaranteed hit. Each social grief-porn story is surrounded by the jarring visual and verbal vocabulary of the social web: "TRENDING," "POPULAR," "SHARE," "LIKE," small upward-pointing arrows, tiny blue thumbs-up signs. We've already been trained, anyway, to present our best selves—the person we want others to believe that we are—on social media. The reaction to tragedy is not longer (just) a privately murmured better them than me but (also) a public performance: I am a feeling human!
It's hard to criticize people for honestly feeling an emotion, or publicly expressing those honest feelings. Even grief porn's most active consumers would agree that the grief one feels for a newborn whose life has only been introduced to you in the context of its impending death is different from the grief felt in confronting the loss of people who made up a part of your life.
Where Facebook and the content providers that orbit it have succeed is in gamifying and monetizing that honest reaction, frictionlessly converting the near-giddy emotional rush received from a awful story into a compulsion: "You have to read how sad this is." We dress it up with sad emojis and condolences, we talk about crying, and sometimes do cry, but it's entertainment—an episode of Parenthood, but with real people. It's something to see, extract a rush of feeling from, and forget. I mean, let's say it: We get off on it.

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Or, really, we're expressing it for ourselves—to show the world our sensitivity and our humanity. We immerse ourselves in ectype pain and then treat normal human responses to these enforced emotional tests as badges of honor. We've convinced ourselves that these adventures into the darkest moments of others lives' are a way to honor them, and to honor humanity in general. We put our compassion on display in a Facebook post. We turn grief into a shibboleth for humanity. We stare at someone else's death and then tell others to do the same. It's porn we can share, because demonstrates our compassion. If only porn porn were so lucky.

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