Amelie Bowen and a friend were filming a dance video for TikTok in her bedroom on Wednesday when Ms. Bowen’s mother entered the room to deliver sad news. Liam Payne, former member of the boy band One Direction, had died.
Ms. Bowen, an 18-year-old student in Redding, England, who has been a fan of the group since she was 4, was shocked. She and her friend initially started laughing in disbelief. It took a few moments for what her mother was saying to register — especially given that Ms. Bowen had been mid-dance with a face of “pirate clown” makeup her friend had put on her as a joke.
Ms. Bowen caught the moment on video and later uploaded it to TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 3.7 million times. (Ms. Bowen has just over 2,000 followers.)
The impulse to post the recording felt natural, she said in an interview: “I’m constantly filming.”
Her video was just one of several that gained traction on the platform in which users have captured their apparent reactions to news of Mr. Payne’s death. In one, workplace security footage shows someone finding out over the phone; in another, a musician who was livestreaming when the news broke abruptly ends a song and shows viewers that she is shaking. Other users filmed themselves telling friends.
In the early days of social media, most users tried to curate slices of their lives to create an aspirational version of themselves. But more recently, users on platforms like Instagram and TikTok — many of them members of Gen Z — have been willing to show their followers much more unvarnished, and sometimes dark, moments, or have been capturing them by accident.
With the camera always rolling, TikTok users have shared their reactions to getting laid off from their tech jobs, experiencing a rare earthquake in New York City this year and taking at-home pregnancy tests. Some have accused the users who post these reaction videos of faking it to attract viewers, but many say this content is the result of lives lived mostly online.
It may be unsurprising that TikTok has become the latest platform to develop its own language of virtual grief. The larger question then becomes one of appropriateness.
In 2018, the YouTuber Logan Paul posted a video in which he and some friends found the body of someone who appeared to have died by suicide in a forest in Japan. Though the video was widely criticized and Mr. Paul eventually apologized, his career did not appear to ultimately suffer.
It seemed to signal a cultural shift online, seemingly eliminating any previously held rules about what experiences were just too private or traumatic to turn into content.
“YouTube did the legwork of making that sort of content feel normal and how you sort of work your way through things, and then TikTok put gasoline on the fire,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the youth culture newsletter After School.
Facebook, too, she said, began to change the way people mourned online.
“We see people write on loved ones’ Facebook walls and, you know, they’ve been dead for 10 years, but there’s still some something in there that they feel the need to express themselves on a public forum,” Ms. Lewis, 37, said. (She said she had a particular fascination with online mourning as her family has been in the funerary business for three generations.)
With more scrutiny on fan culture and larger questions about our online attachments to people we don’t know, people have debated how to appropriately mourn the death of a celebrity. Since strong emotions tend to drive high engagement to videos on TikTok and other platforms, it can be uncomfortable when content surrounding a tragedy draws wide attention.
But others say congregating online after a celebrity’s death is a way to mourn alongside a community of fans.
One Direction fans, known colloquially as Directioners, have long congregated in online spaces. Ms. Bowen said she felt posting her video would help connect her with other mourners. Hundreds of people have left comments on her video who say they are also processing their feelings about Mr. Payne’s death, as people would at a wake.
Still, Ms. Bowen said even her own father had questioned her generation’s penchant for posting through difficult moments.
“What they don’t understand is that everyone’s doing it; it’s not just a few people posting their whole life,” she said. “Everyone’s posting this sort of thing and it’s just this age, this generation, everything is publicized.”
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