Woman Tweets; Internet Busybodies Suddenly Convinced Her Life Is Their Business

If a member of my family died, I don't think the internet would be the first place I turned for support. But if I did, I would hope it would be my own damn business.
Shellie Ross, a mother who blogs for a living, tweeted about her son's death within an hour after it happened, and has since been subject to personal attack and generalized overexposure by nosy internet fanatics and overzealous journalists.

Here's the lede from the New York Post story:
          A mother obsessed with posting her daily life's minutiae on
          Twitter was busy tweeting about the birds in her back yard
          five minutes before her toddler drowned in the family
          pool -- then kept right on tweeting about the horrifying news
          from the hospital ER.

There's an implication, in every story and every comment, that this woman lives for the internet. That she's self-obsessed and the most mundane exhibitionist ever. And that she's exemplary of some growing social tendency. Which she might be. But she's also a human being.

Every headline contains the word "tweet" or "twitter," even those from the family's own local paper--and that paper, Florida Today, also reconstructs the incident in terms of Twitter posts. The focus is never on the actual death of the actual child; it's about how his mother decided to react. Everything about the news coverage says to Shellie Ross, "You are not a person. You are a story."

A little boy drowning is a terrible thing, but as warning stickers on plastic pools everywhere will tell you, it happens all the time.The real news is that the little boy's mother went straight to the internet to ask people to "pray like never before." What a thoughtless, soulless, neglectful way to react to--wait, what? A mother, at the hospital waiting to see if her son will live or die, reaches out to her community for support. Is that really so novel?

Let me answer that. No. What's novel is that she replaced the usual barrage of phone calls to family and friends with a tweet--a much more efficient method, but also much more public, which is why the public somehow feels justified in involving itself in her personal crisis.

Madison McGraw, author of www.madisonmcgraw.com and complete stranger to the Ross family, posted this, quoted in Florida Today:
          “The person that I have compassion for is her son — who
            might still be alive if (Ross) interacted with her son like
            she interacted with people on Twitter. To me, that shows the
            repercussions for social media gone awry.”

To this, I can only say: how dare you, Madison McGraw? You have a Web site named after yourself, for crying out loud--you're clearly no stranger to social media. How dare all of you for turning a woman going through an unimaginably difficult experience into an example, an allegory...I have read all the coverage I can find on this (which I suppose implicates me as well, but I'd like to think I had a different motivation) and I can say definitively that the issues raised are not nearly interesting enough to justify exposing private grief for public scrutiny. The news coverage has only provided further opportunity for people with no idea what they're talking about to weigh in on a subject that was none of their business in the first place.

The Star Tribune, in an especially classy show of journalistic denial, reported: "On her blog, Ross has asked media outlets to leave her alone and said she won't comment on what happened." Except the Star Tribune, right? Right?!

There are plenty of opportunities to talk about "social media gone awry," plenty of examples to turn to without turning a family's grief into a freak show. Leave these people alone already.

Debating the Debate About the Debate

On the Huffington Post today: BBC Slammed for Debating Ugandan Bill to Kill Gays.

Politicians and, maybe more influentially, tweeters were infuriated by the very existence of this forum, which invites conversation on a recent proposal in Uganda to allow imprisonment of gays and people who support or protect them, and the death penalty for "serial offenders" and those with HIV.

I think I need to say this first: I'm horrified. Now, as always, I'm depressed as hell that people are treating each other this way. That entire groups of people are being condemned simply for being who they are. I think this proposed law, along with all other wholesale government-sponsored discrimination, is fundamentally, tragically, ten-steps-backward-for-the-human-race wrong. But that's not really the question, is it?

Coverage of the actual situation in Uganda has been eclipsed by coverage of the outrage at the BBC for posting this discussion. 

The HuffPost article quoted a politician saying, "We should be condemning it, and the BBC should be condemning it. ... Instead it seems to have thought it appropriate to come up with something that suggests it's a subject for discussion."

I think that's a dangerous attitude. The statement that an issue is "not a subject for discussion" is at the same time a statement that the body raising said issue doesn't deserve to be heard. The Ugandan government, not some nutso backwoods rogue offshoot of the KKK, is proposing this legislation. They run a country. What are we saying when we dismiss offhand an entire culture's earnestly-held belief?

Uganda's ethics minister, James Nsaba Buturo, is quoted in the New York Times saying that homosexuality ''is not natural in Uganda.'' Ethics minister. He didn't get there by completely failing to represent the views of anyone in the country. And he supports--although with the disclaimer that the death sentence part will probably be "reviewed"--a bill whose essential message is "you're not like us, so we're getting rid of you."

But come on. What are we doing, O Great Western World? Gay rights groups are demanding that Uganda be ousted from the Commonwealth for entertaining the idea. The entire Western world is demanding that Uganda's citizenship in the global debate on human rights be revoked. What's the message? You're not like us, so we're getting rid of you.

We're doing this the wrong way. This is not the way to make human rights happen. I know we think our motivation is purer, but we are not setting a good example for how to treat people like people.The beautiful thing about a debate, a real debate, is that it has the power to change minds. Have you ever won an argument just by telling your opponent they were wrong? No. That goes nowhere. Dismissal is not the same as conversion. 

So I say bravo, BBC, for acknowledging a debate, however distasteful, that is actually going on. For respecting the people of Uganda enough to treat them like legitimate players in their own fate.For believing in democracy even when it means genuine conflict. For not apologizing for reporting the truth: in the words of BBC's David Stead, the forum "focuses on and illustrates the real issue at stake."

Which is what the news should do. It's not there to censor or editorialize. It's just there to report. Even when what's true is not what we want to hear.