So, let me start by saying that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or bad about using Twitter as way to express grief or pass on condolences, and I do have to admit a healthy serving of ignorance when it comes to Twitter -- I don't have an account and have no real interest in having one. Maybe it's just because it's called "Twitter" and everybody's little messages are "Tweets" it comes off sounding so lame. I bring forth exhibit A, which is anyone's use of the sentence"I just tweeted." Though the whole thing's really no different than when I clogged the Internet in the late 90s with AIM away messages, and then switched into Facebook & Gmail in the 2000s to spout little "hey look at me!" messages. (Hey, uh, Melvin? Twitter also ain't too different from this here blog you be writin' on.) So yes I know I'm being a little hypocritical. We all want to be noticed.
But.
When really profound events like prominent deaths or natural disasters happen and some of the first things you see are things like So-in-So tweeted this bit of sadness, and that-other-person tweeted his condolences -- I saw an article about Nate Dogg's death that wasn't really an article so much as a catalog of celebrity tweets. Is it incredibly cynical of me to imagine a publicist who has no idea, really, who Nate Dogg was but tells a client that his/her quiet grief isn't enough, that everybody's using this Twitter thing, and that he/she must tweet something really special to stay relevant? -- so when all this happens at once, don't you just feel so...empty? Am I alone in this feeling?
It could be that it's really the events themselves that make me sad, and I'm just taking out my sadness/anger at said events on the messenger, Twitter. But this time taking it out on the messenger does seem somewhat appropriate. It's like getting told by some bro in flip flops and a backwards hat that your gramma just died, but hey man just have a beer and click on this sweet link about cats. I think there's something deeper here that's a little bit harder to confront, and even harder to understand. Really it all just begs a lot of questions. Like, why are people expressing their grief with this technology that limits all expressions to just 140 characters? Why do some people make their grief public while others do so in private? Is there a difference between 1 million tweets of grief and, say, the 20-30,000 humans who grieved together in Liverpool when John Lennon was killed? Does a GriefTweet (I think I just made that up) make someone feel better? And here's a weird one: is it easier to grieve online than it is out in the 'real world'? Oh god, and that brings up another line of questioning: are there people out there who think the Internet isn't really the 'real world'?
I'm not even all that sure what I'm getting at, other than that Twitter smells really intensely like the kind of thing we're going to look back on in 20 years as occasionally useful but mostly just sort of profoundly dumb. Especially when you see a page full of Tweets -- it looks like bathroom stall graffiti. Is that really where you want to grieve?
God I feel old. And cranky. Maybe I should go post on Twitter.
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