OK…this is totally unrelated to anything other than - well, a sort of horrified disgust. Mind you, the news article this comes from lumps Twittering funerals in with “elaborate yet empty Second Life press bureaus spring to mind” which just adds another layer of horror I suppose.
I mean, really, Twittering a funeral…
Quotes:
“pallbearers carry out coffin followed by mourners.”
“coffin lowered into ground”
“earth being placed on coffin.”
This may be twittering a “news event” but…well…what do you think?
I was inwardly disgusted when my brother video taped our dad’s funeral, including the open coffin. I didn’t say anything to him, though, allowing him to confront the death in his own way. I can only reflect on the vast chasms of differences between how my brother and I interact with the universe. For instance, maybe, I ponder, it allowed him to distance himself from the immediate moment by putting it in a virtual (taped/televised) slot in his mind. Or maybe he is just creepy and socially inept.
I have to give some of the same slack to a funeral twitterati - perhaps they are so infatuated in buffering reality in this way that the habit carries over to inappropriate moments. (I don’t want to check to see if they document their digestive tract.) Perhaps they were doing this for the benefit of not the whole web, but really a particular person or two that were not able to attend the funeral. In the same vein, perhaps they had friends that were supporting them, and this bit of the web’s virtuosity of connectivity and immediacy gave them a blanket of support.
I was getting text messages from Pais’ SL friends while the RL me sat vigil watching someone die. In those sad and loneliest moments of my RL in the wee hours of the morning, my SL friends seven time zones ahead of me were awake and reaching through whatever technology could bring us together in that hospital room… a cell phone text message.
On the surface, since we can see those twitters in public webspace, it is easy to think the author was a callous wank. Perhaps s/he’s just another one of us souls wondering the wilderness of experience, and a thread of technology helped them connect somewhere with another soul or two that could help give meaning and comfort.
Pais - you’re absolutely right. There are all kinds of media and forms we use to communicate feeling. We mediate our feelings because it’s the way we know how, maybe - and cutting off the technology doesn’t mean that we somehow become authentic, nor does using technology make us unauthentic.
But I do think there’s something to be said for the occasional experience unmediated by technology. And to be honest, I think I’d put funerals WAAAAY up on the list of milestones in which I would have hoped that we could hold off the intrusion of Blackberrys and twitter streams.
But in this particular instance the Twittering wasn’t from a family member, it was a member of the news media. The reporter decided that his readers - people who didn’t know the family other than through the front page of the paper, would like to be kept posted BY THE MINUTE what was happening.
Which brings us to the question of the reporter’s role - I mean, is this any different than say televising, hmm…Lady Di’s funeral say. We’re all spectators? Does the way in which it’s reported matter? Is a Twitter stream better or worse than radio or TV? Or am I betraying a sort of ‘yesterday bias’ - I’m just not as young and hip as I never was kind of thing.
My whole reaction to this on so many levels is probably the most interesting thing about the whole story.
Ugh. I didn’t realize it was a reporter doing the twitter. That makes most, if not all, of my discussion irrelevant.
Seems to me that the reporter transformed the funeral into content for his/her media stream …. reducing a profoundly complex, layered ritual into data bits… ick.