Archive for April 2011
Food for Thought
“In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”
–Tim Hetherington-
I happened on Tim Hetherington’s tweet dated April 19th in which he stated that he was in besieged Misrata, a town under attack by Qaddafi loyalists. The next day after his tweet he was dead. As absurd as this technology may seem at times or as trite as most of the twitter hive mind is, I think this technology is coming full circle. Words from a man I never knew appeared in my home, and the following day he was dead, reminding me and hopefully hundreds of other people that things–real things, real stories of sacrifice, violence, bloodshed–are happening around the world while I sit in my comfortable chair staring at a computer screen. This point has been driven home in a way that your typical news article could not achieve, and while I’m not heralding the dawn of a twitter revolution or championing it as the greatest tool for change since the printing press, I am intrigued by the level of intimacy it creates at times. It caught me off guard. I feel like I’m writing about Don DeLillo’s “Videotape” here or something, but instead of a desensitization via a repeated video image, I felt a moment of empathy.
The page with the tweet can be found at http://twitter.com/#!/TimHetherington
