The temporal logic of media practices: Mourning and the tooling of time on Facebook

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of temporal logic to theorize how users engage with time as part of their media practices. Analyzing 40 cases of mourning and memorialization practices across Facebook’s Profiles, Groups, and Pages, the study identifies three core components: a twofold engagement with time (calendric and discursive), temporal introspection, and temporal convergence. The calendric use of time involves specific dates that serve as temporal triggers for posting, while the discursive use describes how users embed time into their posts—through rich and repeated time expressions, poetic narration, and so on. Time becomes a communicative resource, not merely a contextual background but an active rhetorical and affective tool. Temporal introspection captures how social media platforms invite users to articulate their inner experience of time, and temporal convergence reveals how multiple temporal layers—personal and collective, offline and online—converge on a single platform, giving rise to new rituals and expressions.