#1

How conscience are you of the implications of your words?

Here’s a piece I wrote about thinking before you tweet

7 Likes
#2

Good piece, made me think it a bit more about a few things.

I think the point about de-romanticising certain events/lives is a good one. It’s easy to get drawn into a romantic narrative when the reality is anything but.

Cases like this are hard to balance when there’s obviously a huge public interest- it’s kind of going against basic human nature to nullify your emotional response it.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here

Anyway

#3

I know exactly what you mean. However, I think it’s possible to know the who, where, and when, without needing to speculate why or to know how. I think we all expect to know far too much nowadays and it isn’t healthy. Often we’re better off not knowing everything.

1 Like
#5

Good piece.

No one wants to live in a world where grief is policed, yet we must strive for it to be responsible to others.

I think it’s also worth considering the volume of tweets as well as their content. It’s very easy to read tweets on a particular subject on your timeline and retweet them, without realising how this may affect those who don’t necessarily follow as many other people, and so don’t have a timeline width the breadth of topics. I saw quite a few well-meaning accounts retweet dozens of posts on the subject within a day or two, and I can see how that could affect people in a bad way.

#6

Sorry. Please don’t think this was me having a go at anyone. I don’t think anyone posted anything massively triggering on here. That really was not the intention of my piece.

#7

I was thinking more like the lyrics to Floating in Tbe Forth. They could be interpreted as a how to guide for some people.

#8

I think Sean has a very valid point here. It has reminded me of last year when one of my friends had a fairly traumatic death whilst playing sport, which made local and national press. I was the twitter account manager of the club at the time and had to deal with the endless tweets, retweets and likes from well wishers. There were various people who would systemically like or retweet every bit of content, meaning I was getting hundreds of alerts a day for about a month. (And couldnt for various reasons turn them off). In short, it was hell, every time you forgot for a second what had happened, your phone would ping with another reminder. Even though it was all supportive stuff, it definitely made the situation worse until I just couldn’t handle being involved anymore. Whilst I don’t think people should think they can’t discuss things like this on social media, what Sean is saying about thinking of the consequences is really important.

3 Likes
#9

This reminds me of a friend who died last week. His partner messaged his friends personally to tell them the news but asked them to not post messages on his Facebook just yet. She had a lot to deal with, things to sort out, and all the social media chat would be distracting and take up time and energy that she needed for other things. Most of us understood and did as asked.

2 Likes