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.