There should be a word for the stomach-lurching sensation of opening Facebook or Twitter to discover—through oblique, foreboding references—that something awful has happened. You’ve missed the breaking story and, like the person in a coma during a zombie attack, emerged to a broken world.
My heart goes out to all the victims in #Aurora.
WTF is wrong with people? You can’t even go to a movie anymore.
Most days my Twitter feed is as varied and engorging as a Las Vegas buffet: Here a thoughtful op-ed, there a tasteless joke by Michael Ian Black, there a recipe from my vegan friend’s blog. Then a tragedy occurs and we all fold in around it, grieving, scolding, sending up a collective death wail. Days after the Newtown shooting it felt wrong to tweet about anything else. Eventually Downton Abbey and the “fiscal cliff” edged into the conversation, but still there was Paul Simon singing at Victoria Soto’s funeral and little Noah Pozner’s open casket until, one by one, we blew out our candles and left.
In the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings the cacophony was deafening. Journalists chided citizens and each other for interfering or misreporting or sensationalizing even as they tried to empathize. Pondering the public’s fascination with police scanners, Paige Williams might as well have described Twitter use in general, writing for the New Yorker: “What drives this behavior? . . . A desire to contribute? To feel needed? To bear witness? To be seen? To participate in an historic drama? Human impulses, all, if considered in the most generous terms.” (Williams is a former colleague of mine at Atlanta magazine.)
The irony, of course, is that people tend to skate around tragic events in daily conversation. If a common knock against Facebook and Twitter is that they have replaced human interaction, they offer in our darkest days a place to share feelings we’d never utter aloud—either because we don’t wish to appear morbid or because it’s hard to segue from the mundane to the barely imaginable. How are you? Well I’m really torn up about that mass shooting, thanks for asking. Said no one ever.
It’s strange, how we can bare our souls to everyone but not to each other. Ask your therapist about it if you have one. The rest of us have Twitter.