I recently stumbled across a post on tomatonation.com regarding the controversy surrounding prominent mommy-blogger Shellie Ross’ decision to tweet about her son drowning. I had heard vaguely about it previously and dismissed it with a long-suffering “oh lord, the internets” eyeroll, but the tomatonation piece make me think about it a little more closely.

Putting aside the impossibility (yet sad inevitability) of judging someone else’s grief, it doesn’t make sense to demonize any one channel of communication as wholly unfit for one type of information and not others. Technologies are anything but innocent of social power, but they also don’t come with predetermined regulations of use. But if we look at Madison McGraw’s now infamous backlash against Shellie Ross, it becomes clear that much of vitriol comes out of a sudden conviction that tweeting — that online activities — encroaches on the real life duties of motherhood.

In other words, the backlash is symptomatic of our contemporary crisis between public and private life, yet another flare-up of a long-brewing technology-triggered moral panic like the ones that have accompanied the development of everything from motion pictures to railroads. Once private acts can now bind us with networked publics, and public events come ready-made with backchannels of private communication. Twitter, and other social media technologies, are generating increasingly contested contact zones between the ideological bravado of the public sphere and the deep intimacies of the domestic one, a digital borderlands where it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate one from the other. And it is becoming harder and harder to accurately anticipate what things are best kept to ourselves.

Moreover, Shellie Ross’ tweets became the focus of such vicious backlash not only because it transformed one of the most deeply domestic acts — child rearing — with a very public one, but also because we are culture for whom public displays of mourning, however abbreviated, remain significantly taboo. Even now. Or perhaps especially now, as technological advancements and wonderous gadgets reassure us of our progress, our ever-increasing forward momentum. And it is disconcerting to see these things as an outlet for something as gear-halting as simple grief. Mourning seems the ultimate recursive loop.

But consider: we humans make sense of our traumas and delights by calling them out, giving them the names and reasons needed in order to share their burdens with one another. In that light, perhaps twitter is an appropriate vehicle for grieving after all. Its limited space gives us the freedom to articulate our distress with whatever utterances we can salvage from the wreckage, however mundane or superficial, and verify that we continue to exist even as someone else does not. And its publicness may remind us, crucially, that though our lives have suddenly grown unimaginably smaller, we are still not yet entirely alone.

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