Is It OK to Tweet Tragedy?

What’s Twitter for anyway? Last week I sent out tweets about my cold, I mentioned the film my girlfriend and I were watching while I was recovering, I send out tweets about these columns. Sometimes I tweet things that friends say, I mention my bad moods, my good moods, and whatever crosses my mind that I think someone else might find interesting. I’ve never really been all that shy about sharing things online. Though I’m certainly not as open as a lot of people I know. For instance, I know a transguy who posted pictures of his anal warts. In fact, he documented every doctor’s visit while he went through the process of having them burned off. That’s over the top, I think.

But what about pain and grief? What’s the rule on sharing that type of personal stuff? There’s a story in the news about a grief-stricken mother tweeting news of her sons death. It’s all over the internet, each blog takes a slightly different tone, defending her, chastising her and several news stories focus more on the vitriolic comments made about this woman and why she chose to use twitter to talk openly about something so personal.

The underlying criticism seems to be that if she were really grieving she’d be unable to type out 140 characters to a bunch of strangers on the internet. Which seems to me a strange form of judgment about how someone should deal with pain.

Her tweets started with a weather report, then a call for her twitter followers to pray and finally several hours later she tweeted about her grief and sent out photos of her child. Here’s the exact timeline, taken from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

"Fog is rolling in thick scared the birds back in the coop," Ross tweeted at 5:22 p.m. on Monday.

At 5:23 p.m., her son called 911 to report that his brother, 2-year-old Bryson, was floating unconscious in the pool. Records show that the Brevard County Fire-Rescue paramedics arrived at Ross' Mirrett Island, Fla., home at 5:38 p.m.

And 34 minutes later, at 6:12 p.m., Ross tweeted again. "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool."

Nearly five hours later, after her son had been pronounced dead, Ross tweeted again.

"Remembering my million dollar baby," she wrote. Ross included a photo of Bryson in the post, time-stamped at 11:08 p.m. A few minutes later, she posted another photo of her son.

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So, if we are all using twitter, facebook, tumblr, and blogs to make our personal lives public is there a line that we aren’t supposed to cross? And what the hell is that line? There seems to be some sense of outrage that the mother tweeted at all, as if she spent more time sending out 140 character messages to her followers than she did raising her children. Not only is that ridiculous, but why wouldn’t someone who sits in front of a TV constantly get hit with the same amount of disapproval? It’s not like she was twittering while her son lay dying in front of her. She simply shared her grief the same way she had shared every other part of her life.

I wonder if it’s because this mother used Twitter as a way of reaching out to the world and making contact with other people. She was home alone with two children, her husband had been deployed. She used Twitter as a way of feeling connected. And anytime a mother wants to actually have some form of contact with the world outside of her children, we judge her. We judge moms more harshly than anyone else. Once a woman becomes a mother her entire identity is subsumed into a caretaker-bot. We think mom’s shouldn’t need anything, like human contact, or friends, or social lives. Once you choose to be a mother, that’s it, you’re done.

I also wonder if all this criticism about her timing or about the medium? Would it have been OK if she had used her Facebook to create a shrine to her dead son? I’ve seen people do that sort of thing. And whatever social networking site, blog or whatever medium the shrine is built in will collect hundreds and hundreds of consolation messages and heartfelt testimonials. I’ve always thought those were a little public and weird, but at the same time, I can see how much better it must feel for the person in pain to have so many people pouring love on them, and for that love to be visible to everyone else.

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