An Essay About Grief in the Age of Social Media
One of the first grieving for Paris tweets that I saw was from Harper’s Bazaar. My first thought was sarcastic…something like, “Thank you, American fashion magazine. Your tweet will totally bring peace.”
But later, thinking about the role that social media plays in our society when it comes to tragedies like this, my sarcasm melted away. I started thinking about WHY I felt so annoyed at first. It’s because I felt that a tweet was so small. Offensive, almost.
But then I started thinking about grief, and how we’re exposed to so many more tragedies on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis compared to my pre-Internet teenagehood. And how we communicate with so many more people in so many more places than when I had my occasional pen pal. We experience more stories through instant journalism. We feel more connected in some ways, and less in others.
Some people tweet and change their Facebook photos to show love or compassion or grief after a tragedy. Others use it as a soapbox moment to talk about all of the other horrible things in the world that aren’t getting their own hashtags. That second stance really bothers me, even when there’s an, “I still feel for Paris…” preamble. It seems like rather than letting people express their grief about an incident that touched them in some way, others are chiding them for not publicly grieving about everything else. If I wrote a Facebook status about everything that sucked that goes on in this world, I’m pretty sure I’d have no “friends” left.
There’s also a quote going around right now, part of which reads, “…not one person’s status update said ‘Baghdad’ because not one white person died in that fire…”. I’m not sure who wrote this, and if they actually did a profile analysis of what “everyone” did or didn’t do, but I can tell you that the sadness that I personally feel about what happened in Paris has nothing to do with what color the people were who died there. When I hear about a tragic event, I always feel pain for those affected, without thinking about race.
At the same time it’s true that I feel more sadness around the event in Paris. Probably because I’ve actually been there. Because of what that city itself represents to me personally, and how magical it has always seemed. It’s like losing a family member versus hearing about someone else losing a family member. I’m sad and I feel terrible for the other person, but I experience more sadness from my own loss.
We don’t all feel the same way about everything or everyone. We’ve all had different life experiences — unfortunately some better and some much worse than others. Sometimes we’re going to be more emotionally affected by some events compared to others. That’s not to say that we don’t care or that we aren’t concerned or that we don’t wish that this world were a different place or that violent weapons had never been invented. It just means that we’re human. Human in world where we communicate with more people than we ever have before. A world where we can show sympathy with a hashtag or a profile photo update.
Instead of saying, “Yeah but you didn’t change your profile photo for_______,” why not just change yours? We don’t need to measure misery. We need to spread love. We need to do what we can to help people. We need a freaking miracle to stop all the violence and torture that is going on in this world. We need to change.