How Facebook Keeps Paul Walker's Memory Alive

A poster for "Furious 7" featuring actors Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. Credit: Universal Studios Picture a group of mourners surrounding a tombstone within a huge graveyard. Their voices blend together in a respectful murmur of words such as "Miss you so much" and "You always gonna be my brother." Then the imaginary tombstone's face displays an image of actor Vin Diesel, his head bowed as if in grief, standing opposite deceased actor Paul Walker. The tagline "One last ride" appears above the film title "Furious 7." The seventh film in the high-octane "Fast and Furious" franchise may appear to be an unlikely vehicle for memorializing Paul Walker, who died in a car crash on Nov. 30, 2013. But the real-life relationships of the close-knit "Fast and Furious" cast and the running theme in the films about the importance of family make "Furious 7" a surprisingly suitable vehicle for sending off Walker in style—especially given that the actor's brothers helped finish filming the movie in his place. In that spirit, Walker's official Facebook page has become an online memorial to the deceased actor that also promotes the newest film in the "Fast and Furious" franchise. Fans flock to Paul Walker's page to both pay their respects and get hyped for the actor's last appearance in the series. "A lot of my research has found that postmortem social networking practices are not sanctified," said Jed Brubaker, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. "While there is a kind of reverence that enters into these spaces, it doesn’t have the overwhelming sense of a graveyard. Instead, what we find is a blend of a familiar social media genre form of communication intermixed with a more traditional funerary style similar to how you would talk at a funeral or gravesite."