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9 Jan

Why We Tweet When We Tweet When Tweeting Seems An Odd Thing To Do

Last week, someone in our community lost her home in a fire. She tweeted about it, and the community rallied (not least because of this dear woman), and although there’s no real happy ending when someone loses so much, it seemed, at least, that one could keep faith with humanity as caring and good. But then – almost immediately – and inevitably – the criticisms came. Why was she was tweeting? Why should someone so irresponsible be supported by the community? Why should the community support anyone they don’t know? What is this ‘community’ thing that everyone is talking about, anyway, because, seriously, how could anyone think that the Internet has communities? There is, after all, no there there.

I’m not going to speak to the question of community support – I have about eleventeen thousand words to say about that, that I’ll save for another time – but I can speak – have spoken to – the question of why we tweet in those moments that seem to defy tweeting – why, indeed, tweeting during those moments tells us something about the very nature of tweeting, and of social sharing generally. Those words, repurposed, are below.

When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

19 Jan

You And I Were Meant To Fly, And, Also Tweet (On Wheelchairs And Internets And Raising Our Voices, Oh My)

Once upon a time, in an Internet far, far away – which is to say, 6 months ago – I tweeted about Air Canada. I tweeted about them a few times, actually – I tweeted that they’d broken my nephew’s wheelchair, and I tweeted that they were working to replace it, and then I tweeted that they hadn’t, in fact, replaced it and had instead left Tanner stranded, immobile, while his mother and I scrambled frantically to reach someone at Air Canada on the telephone and did anyone out there have a number that didn’t start with 1-800 and end with ‘we’re sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to call back on Monday’? – and it kind of started what is often colloquially referred to as a shit storm.

I’ve never written about that shit storm. I’ve never written about it because, frankly, by the time it was over I was sick of the whole thing. I was sick of the whole thing during the whole thing, actually: I was sick of what it did to Tanner and my sister; I was sick of how it took hold of us and shook us and demanded that we explain ourselves, dammit; I was sick of how it spilled TV cameras and reporters into the hall outside our room and how it pulled them along behind us on the sidewalk and in the park and on the subway and demanded that they ask, again and again, does this demonstrate the power of Twitter? Does this demonstrate the power that Twitter gives the little guy? I was sick of trying to explain, yes and no; it’s complicated; this is a triumph, and also not a triumph, and could you please leave that little guy alone? Because that little guy is scared and confused by all of the attention and this isn’t helping.

15 Feb

Love In The Time Of Internet

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened?

21 Dec

“Who, If I Cried Out, Would Hear Me?” On Twitter, Tales And Tragedy

When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.