Hello again,
I decided a little while ago that I feel uncomfortable with the way in which death is discussed on social media. Not by everyone, of course. But, in the general sense, discussions around highly publicised deaths tend to evolve and mutate in such a way that the end of a person’s life becomes a hook to talk about all manner of topical discussion points.
Always when it happens there are some strands of the discussion I agree with and some I don’t. And then there are some perspectives aired which I don’t just disagree with but find repellent. But actually, whether I agree or not, I started to find the whole form of the discussion unnerving.
I began to feel that it was removing the person at the centre of it, the person who’s life had ended, from the realm of reality and turning the memory of them into something else. An avatar, yes. And of course everything and everyone on social media is an avatar so that is not specific to the dead person. But it started to feel, to me, like they were becoming something beyond that: Basically another hypothetical strand of the discourse. One of the talismans (or you could think of them as shorthands) which can be argued about endlessly because there is a critical mass of strongly held opposing views on them, which can sustain endless discussion: something like landlords or rent or gentrification or university fees. Basically I felt the dead person tended to become something hypothetical rather than someone real.
On social media there is a sense in which nothing feels real. I think this has to do with the flatness of it. I mean that literally: Little boxes of text and pictures fill a flat screen and you become desensitised to the different types of information you receive across this format, and the fact that, despite the uniformity of the format, these different types of information have totally different gravities and shapes and meanings. A box announcing a friend’s birthday sits under a box full of a joke and above a box holding a video of a murder. I think this uniformity of format is genuinely discombobulating. I think another effect it has is that there is no sense of time having passed across social media, I actually think this is why decade old tweets can provoke such furore sometimes. They simply don’t look or feel old. They don’t read to us as something which happened a long way in the past.
Social media is an unreal, psychedelic space. And death is a strange thing to think and talk about anyway. I don’t understand it myself, in that I can’t fully conceive of the enormity of it. It is such a strange, serious thing to be discussed in this unreal, psychedelic space. But it is all the time of course. I don’t really know what that is doing to how we think about and understand it. My sense is that it is fostering a sense of unreality about events of enormous severity. Something that I think supports this is that, while writing this, I googled Jordan Neely to check the suggested searches, which indicate what people have been searching related to him. The first result was: Jordan Neely video. (The second was more positive: Jordan Neely fundraiser).
This is not to say that all social media discourse about a person who has died in the sort of tragic circumstances which generate public outcry is equivalent. Arguing that it was fair and reasonable for Jordan Neely to be murdered on the subway because someone else may theoretically have found him scary is an abhorrent thing to do. And also sort of frighteningly disconnected from the reality of what happened. There is basically a reward (in terms of attention and therefore perhaps media coverage which can potentially be used to generate money on podcast subscriptions or the like) for whoever is willing to say the most outrageous thing about a situation like this one. This makes me question the sincerity of the really outrageous things that are said. When I see something like that I find myself asking a series of bleak questions: Does the person who is saying this really think it? Or are they saying it for attention? Which is worse?
Arguing on social media that Jordan Neely’s murder shows how casually dehumanised homeless people are, on the other hand, is not a bad thing to do. But the volume of such arguments about high profile murders (because it is usually murders that cause this response) started to feel strange to me. The fact that Jordan Neely’s name, within the space of a few days, stopped reading as a real name. This is not to say I have a better solution than talking about it, and I know that if everyone stopped making the positive argument then probably the only thing left would be the negative one. (Although maybe not, maybe doing so would be less of a route to attention, I find it hard to say). So people do sort of have to make the positive one; that’s the trap of social media. Still, I started to find it strange. And I don’t think I’m the only person who will feel like this.
I read this piece which I thought did an extraordinary job of capturing the “businesslike detachment” with which we treat homeless people, and others who are relegated to the fringes of society. This part in particular about “public suffering” made me think about how social media functions as a forum of public suffering and how inured we have become to the sight of it there:
It is a testament to how inured we’ve become to the sight of public suffering. We step around or over people who appear as obstacles to the smooth unfolding of our days. We prefer that their misery not impinge on our own lives. But the indifference and fear that maintain this border can be as lethal as a chokehold.
I know writing this is not so different from tweeting about Neely. And I’m not saying that everyone writing blogs or newsletters instead of Instagram posts and Tweets would be any less strange. Actually, it would likely be even weirder. I’m definitely not saying I’m any better than anyone tweeting about it. But I wanted to try and express how strange the social media response to tragedies like this one has started to feel to me, anyway. It is something I have been thinking about for a while now.
Till next time xxxx