A friend of mine alerted me yesterday to the hoopla surrounding a tweet from entrepreneur and career counselor to young women, Penelope Trunk, who posted the following last week: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”
The tweet has sparked controversy throughout the blogosphere, particularly on women’s sites, from feminist protesting Trunk’s cavalier approach to abortion to concerns about the appropriateness of the material. Amanda Marcotte, controversial blogger and pot-stirrer par excellence, supported the tweet as “an elegant instance of the power of Twitter.”
Comments ranged from the predictable “gross!” to the sympathetic “perhaps this is how she expresses her grief” and naturally, the moral implications of abortion have been front and center.
My first question is: in our brave (or perhaps I should say, narcissistic) world of full and immediate disclosure, is anything off-limits?
I’ve always said that if content disturbs you, you are free to ignore it. In the good old days of print journalism, the “naughty” magazines came in brown wrappers and movies were (and still are, sort of) rated so you knew what you were getting into – or not.
But tweets go to the followers, who send them to others, who dissect and analyze them and then forward them to all sorts of outlets. How could I – or my nine-year-old niece – have avoided this tweet? Do I want her thinking everyone is (or should be) this seemingly easy-going about a miscarriage or an abortion? Will she be fooled into thinking these issues come with no more emotional complications than perhaps irritation or relief?
Trunk argues that miscarriage is a fact of life and life intrudes on work, and you can’t manage the balance if you can’t talk about it. I agree. Lots of things are facts of life: the messiness of grief, the reality of resenting one’s offspring, the gracelessness of aging, or petty pleasure one occasionally takes from seeing someone else fail. Maybe these things do need to come out in the open. Besides, tweeting about the taboo is a great career-booster.
But to my second question: can you really describe anything important in 140 characters?
1 Woman' s Vu by Nikki Stern 
Yes, miscarriage and work and whether or not you had a good bowel movement are all facts of life; but no, you don’t get to say anything and everything that’s on your mind whenever you please. Nor do you get to tell your boss he’s a jerk, nor eat the whole cake nor steal that pretty bag in the store because it matches your shoes! Come on people, grow up! Learn to censor yourself–just a little bit, please.
And yes, you really can describe something important in 140 characters. Just write a little haiku or senryu or tanka or cinquain or even the odd limmerick.
Now what you write is both apropos and worth reading. If you begin to “tweet”, I could become a follower. Most tweeters would be better served by knitting to keep their fingers busy.
First and foremost Nikki, let me say how much I enjoy your thought-provoking posts, regardless of what profound or senseless comments may be forthcoming…..
Obviously her decision to not have the baby was done with absolute lack of remorse, given the content of her tweet. In that context, it seems the miscarriage to her was no different than having to go through the hassle of making an appointment with a dentist to remove a loose tooth, only to have it fall out of your mouth the next day during a meeting.
But certainly the tooth and the baby reside on two different levels of morality within our society. Abortion remains a topic of great division in our society so one should expect one faction or the other to react when there is almost an ‘in-your-face’ moment from one of the faction’s perspective. As to the tweet being aimed at that purpose, I seriously doubt that. It could have easily come and gone without fanfare but it does seem that she chose to get a little too cute with it.
Personal revelations are a thing of personal choice. In my day you would probably have whispered it to a friend and that be the end of it. Now days, given the depth of Cyberspace, you are your own national news service and are able to broadcast your every thought and whisper to an ever eager audience willing to give you ear. If you strike a chord with them or if you even cross a line with them, then they will amplify your message a hundred fold, and those hundred fold a hundred fold more.
Is anything off limits? Of course not! The Internet gives voice from the crudest to the unthinkable and if the “thing” rises to a national interest, just the financial aspects of it alone will drive it to the ends of the earth until it loses its steam and value to its propagators.
Are 140 words enough? In most cases probably not, but in a society who strives to get from here to there quicker and quicker, tweeting meets their needs. Blogging, which is some fifteen years old or so, has already become too time consuming and imposing for many. You have to think too much and compared to tweeting, you are limiting your coverage. Having a few interested commenters frequenting a blog has been transformed into desiring hundreds of followers in what appears to be a managed-care popularity contest catering to followers who are waiting with baited breath on your every move and every remark. A world functioning on ‘one-liners’ is a world void of any real social interaction and/or content whatsoever.
three thoughtful comments – many, many thanks!
Fascinating post! Thoughtful and well-written as always.
Twitter and Blogging have brought up so many issues with privacy. While I think tweeting about a miscarriage is crossing the line I think we have to be careful about only sharing our positive experiences. People who rely on their social networks for news on their friends may believe that everyone has a better life than them.
I think the best advice is not to tweet anything you wouldn’t want your mother, children or news media outlets to know.