{"id":117,"date":"2013-04-15T21:39:20","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T01:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/?p=117"},"modified":"2013-04-15T21:50:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T01:50:20","slug":"social-media-silence-and-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/?p=117","title":{"rendered":"Social Media, Silence and Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"My<\/a>

My cat, in her Fortress of Solitude. Following the grand internet tradition of expressing emotions through cat pictures.<\/p><\/div>\n

Social media creates an interesting paradox. It allows us to express emotion communally. To work through fear and confusion and anger and sadness with likeminded individuals, in a way that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. When I watch a tragedy unfold, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but take a step back and look at how people are relating to it, and to each other.<\/p>\n

I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t comment on it, most of the time. In fact, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say anything at all, most of the time.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure it makes me look callous, and unfeeling. Or at the very least self-centered and oblivious.<\/p>\n

And therein lies the paradox. Social media creates a communal place to pour our emotions. To share them, and to work through them publically.<\/p>\n

So what about those of us who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do public emotion?<\/p>\n

Those of us who, when faced with something horrible happening are just as likely to stare dumbly at the imparter of the news and mold their face into some approximation of sadness or sympathy, or whatever is the expected outward expression of our inner turmoil<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel sadness for the lives lost, or anger at the person or people who did hurt others. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sympathize with those who feel pain or fear that something else is coming.<\/p>\n

I feel it. Intensely. Deeply. To the point of paralysis.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show it. Or at least I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show it in the way that is expected.<\/p>\n

As I was writing this, I clicked over to Facebook to see Stephanie Zvan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s excellent post It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Okay to Look Away<\/a> and almost stopped writing this, because she said most of what I wanted to say. Then I realized that there was a piece that I could add. Her post is about consumption of the media streams. Mine is about participating.<\/p>\n

The news feeds are horrifying, entrancing, hopeful, nerveracking and occasionally inspiring. But what they really are is all-encompassing. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to let yourself step away from them. Both from fear that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll miss new developments, yes, but also from fear that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be disconnected from your community.<\/p>\n

From the calls for businesses to stop their pre-scheduled tweets, to snippy comments about people still posting about their everyday angst while tragedy was unfolding, the twitter stream and the facebook feed leave no room for normalcy.<\/p>\n

It is lovely as a community of support, but where does that leave those people who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t process their emotions out in the open? Or who may process their emotions differently?<\/p>\n

You see, I have roughly two outward emotional speeds for dealing with things which make me feel negative emotions: blank, or sobbing. I have to be angry far past the point of reason, or sad past all hope of cheering up before I will start shouting and crying. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t experience emotions on a binary, but I do express them on one. And neither of those extremes lend themselves to public expression.\u00c2\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

So I stay silent. Or post about nifty cuttlefish. Or comment on the rare posts that aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t on-topic. And I read the comments saying that Everyone. Must. Be. Focused. On. This. Thing. and I feel profoundly and deeply alienated. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a big and scary thing to face a constantly scrolling outpouring of emotion when that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not your mode of expression. It’s hard to figure out when you’re allowed to post your trite, silly comments about sea creatures again.<\/p>\n

My defense mechanism is usually to actively resist posting the other things that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking about to distract me from the pain. This usually means avoiding Facebook altogether, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m tired of that. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m tired of the eyes that judge the lack of public response as indicative of emotional disengagement.\u00c2\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

I know I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not the only one. I see other people disappear, or make pithy comments. I see an uptick in certain people posting cat pictures or talking about cool space things. But they seem as profoundly alone as I feel. A small quiet boat in a sea where the waves actively push you to subsume yourself under them.\u00c2\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

But we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not quiet because we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re self-centered, or oblivious, or ignorant or out-of-touch. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re silent because the real conversation is happening inside our heads, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re working it out in the solitude of our minds so that we can rejoin the conversation when the emotion isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t so raw, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t so new. We may be silent because we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how to respond. We may be silent because we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to. We may be silent because we need to be, because that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only thing that keeps us from falling into hysterics in the grocery store parking lot.<\/p>\n

So don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t judge our silence. We may not \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Share if your thoughts are with Boston!!!1 \u00c2\u00a0~\u00e2\u20ac\u2122~<@<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but our thoughts are with Boston. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re experiencing the same thing you are, in our own way. \u00c2\u00a0We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just doing it inside our heads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Social media creates an interesting paradox. It allows us to express emotion communally. To work through fear and confusion and anger and sadness with likeminded individuals, in a way that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. When I watch a tragedy unfold, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but take a step back and look at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}