Managing Death Anxiety Through Social Media: The Platformed Body and Digital Thanatography on Douyin

Abstract

This study investigates how terminally ill cancer patients on Douyin manage death anxiety through the curation of a “digital body.” Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of 25 vloggers, the practice is theorized as “platformed thanatography.” The analysis reveals the digital body serves a dual function: as a prosthetic self, it creates a persistent, future-oriented archive for symbolic immortality; as a therapeutic tool, it transforms chaotic suffering into a publicly validated narrative. It is argued that Douyin operates as a contemporary “technology of the dying self.” Crucially, this existential agency is enacted within the platform’s affective infrastructure, where algorithmic governance and a sympathy economy impose normative scripts of “ambivalent positivity” and commodify vulnerability. The study concludes that while digital platforms offer new resources for confronting mortality, they simultaneously subject the dying experience to the logics of datafication and extraction, highlighting critical tensions between digital immortality and embodied decay.