According to Danish professor in media studies Stig Hjarvard, today's society and culture are increasingly either submitted to or dependent of the media and their logic. The omnipresent characteristic of the media is changing society's institutions and the cultural circuits. Thus mediatization describes the long term process through which instutions and interaction modes are being changed in culture and society due to the media's increasing influence. Mediatization defines and frames the way we experience and how we define ourselves and the roles we play in connection to this experience.

Web 2.0 marks a social turn in digitally mediated communication and culture, placing the media user in the role as co-producer, innovator and participant which accentuates the impact of media on today's society and culture. The term covers a variety of interactive systems which among other things facilitates the building of communities and the continuous storytelling process of constructing identity; systems allowing creating unique and editable profiles, adding personal content and sharing it with other people in your network(s) AND systems for publishing your own life: becoming visible to others, being connected and being observed. As such the technologies embraced by the term Web 2.0 may be desicribed as social machines facilitating various types of architectures of participation. Thus Web 2.0 become emblematic of how society and our life practices are submitted to mediatization.

More and more websites turn up on the Internet facilitating the process of mourning for people who have lost loved ones (children, lovers, siblings, parents etc), websites like e.g. Letters to Heaven. In this paper we analyze the Danish mourning website, mindet.dk (mindet means memory). On this website participants perform their grief by designing online memory spaces for their loved one(s) displaying photographs, poetry, stories and expressions of grief and longing. They take part in expressions of empathy for others by lighting candles for other people's loved ones, they share their personal experiences in different chatrooms and the website offers services as a calendar displaying anniversaries, different guestbook facilities etc.

With a departure point in the works of, among others, Castells and Lofland, we argue that online mourning groups reflects different stagings or ritualizations of grief that reflect different aspects or degrees of the private and/or public by including different agents, different social matrices and different levels of performativity. In doing so we focus on the performative ritualization and relation-building strategies displayed on the website. Our basic assumption is that mindet.dk forms a genuine community where individuals are offered a ritualized (marked) space for their individual performances of grief AND at the same time is given the possibility of performing sympathy/empathy towards others mourning. And using the concept of mediatization from among others Hjarvard we suggest that the influence media have on life practices such as grieving and morning becomes evident when it comes to a website like mindet.dk and that parallels may be drawn to other mediatized ritualistic practices such as the aesthetical staging of Danish children's burial sites.

In the 1990'ies ‘new media' was seen as something separate, a new and strange world, a ‘cyberspace' situated somewhere else and of a completely different character than what we - using a very problematic term - call ‘real life'. Today cyberspace and real life is rather part of the same continuum, the online world is not a totally new social sphere with a totally different set of social rules and matrices but displays the same wide range of performative, social and communicative aspects as do the offline world.

That being said, at the same time, performing your grief online, apparently offers you a media and a technology that you are familiar with (the computer, the internet, chatrooms etc) that gives you the opportunity to express grief within your own cultural and social spaces as opposed to offline mourning that are often kept in a language and social spaces set aside from ordinary life (e.g. the church). By enrolling yourself in this editable community you commit yourself to an ongoing communication with the person you lost and with other people in the same situation as yourself.  And this continued mediatized dialogic practice accentuates the feeling of still being in close contact with the deceased and being allowed to perform your grief.