All in all...
March 13th, 2014, author Teju Cole published A Piece of the Wall on Twitter in hopes of starting a conversation on the issues surrounding immigration across the Mexican-American boarder.
In theory, using Twitter as a distribution platform is brilliant; however, reality rarely meets our expectations. While Cole argues that “[the Twitter] audience deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the paper crowd,” I find it hard to take anything seriously on a platform that actively promotes the following (And just be thankful I only found a nonsensical post. They get pretty bad):
On the other hand, while I want to be hyper-critical of the informal air around the piece on twitter, it’s hard to ignore that the shitposts and ads (as seen below) provide an interesting juxtaposition with the heavy immigration issues:
Come on, Mandy. Criminal Minds is about serial killers. It’s almost impossible not to get dark and morbid. But seriously, I started chastising myself for being interested in this ad when Cole’s essay was looming above with the line, “You have come to quite a different view of the afterlife.” Can you say “irony”?
To me, the above tweet was an eerie echo of Los Desaparecidos: those that were taken by their governments, tortured, and assumed killed during the Dirty War in Argentina. Los desconocidos, as seen in Cole’s essay, were exiled from opportunity by a government using military-like actions, a WALL. (Sidebar: if you’re interested in learning more about los desaparecidos, you should check out this play.) I had a very visceral reaction to that tweet, which I wasn’t expecting. It was the the conciseness of Cole’s wording (which was slightly dictated by Twitter’s character limit) that triggered this sea of over-whelming emotions.
While Twitter allows for us to access stories faster, evokes emotional responses (which may not always be good, per say), and connects us to powerful movements via the web, it’s hard to ignore the lack of longevity of stories on this platform. There’s a reason things “Trend” instead of last. We have to keep refreshing because there’s always a new story that is BIGGER, bloodier, and better than the last. Information gets packed down and lost in the waves.
I mean, here we are three years after Cole posted his essay on immigration to Twitter, and we’re dealing with a President that openly campaigned for the WALL. Maybe it’s time for a call to action?
