deathfluencer
English
Etymology
Blend of death + influencer, equivalent to death + -fluencer.
Noun
deathfluencer (plural deathfluencers)
- (informal) A social-media personality focused on death and/or funerary practices.
- 2020 July 16, Jennifer Miller, “Boom Time for Death Planning”, in The New York Times[1]:
- “The stigma and taboos around talking about death have been way reduced,” Cake’s co-founder Suelin Chen, 38, said. This has driven conversation across social media, spurred interest in deathfluencers (they will discuss how funeral homes are responding to the coronavirus but also whether your pet will eat your eyeballs) and increased traffic to end-of-life platforms.
- 2022 February 25, Samuel Holleran, “How popular culture helps with the business of death”, in Pursuit[2], The University of Melbourne:
- ‘Deathfluencers’ have appeared on TikTok and a new breed of entrepreneurs have entered the traditionally staid funeral business looking to shake things up.
- 2023, Eveliina Kuitunen, "Dying matters: An ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West ", thesis submitted to the University of Oxford, page 26:
- I had steadily followed and watched three years' worth of videos from the YouTube channel AskAMortician by Caitlin Doughty, a California-based funeral director and activist who founded The Order of the Good Death in 2011 and in doing so, is the primary media personality or deathfluencer and originator of "death positivity" as a label for the ideological orientation of the movement I study in 2013.