Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

sobbing in Hannafords where pharmacist unmoved by pain of stage IV metastatic cancer. 4:38 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

HE, unlike me, would be a more diligent caretaker of his loved one. He basically said this. 4:41 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

With a bit of distance I see my tweets as a record of how stress and trauma affected me. Most times in my life, I surely would have headed to the car at any early sign of impending tears. But I just didn’t care. I needed juice boxes and cat litter.

When Kevin and I met, we uprooted each other. He was all Berkeley and blue eyes with lightning wit, crazy intellect, consuming passions — books, politics, computers, for some reason, me, even if I had to kiss him the first time, sitting on a beach in winter as a cold wind came off the Pacific.

But we lived on opposite coasts. I was seven years older. It was improbable and romantic, but he quit a good job, packed his belongings — with a bit of the grad student’s soul still — into a two-door Honda Civic and drove to my house in northern Vermont. Kevin missed his friends and the rhythm of the city, but we got a Newfie and we cooked, and when his favorite Latino band came from L.A., I danced like never before. Through it all I made notes of the absurd and the beautiful. The idea of tweeting that time would have felt as substantial as blowing bubbles into the sky through a child’s plastic bubble wand.

Yet soon enough we had both the child and the requisite plastic wand. Kevin would blow hundreds of bubbles — the signal that bath time really was over — to the sound of riotous laughter as they popped over sweet soaped toddler skin. I can still hear the giggles.

We had eight years together, a son and a daughter before cancer turned vibrant life fragile. It was mostly Kevin who fought to make the time count, even when it was hard, but I would try. Between rants I told some lighter stories on Twitter.

When taking a hot bath to relieve an aching back, allowing a 5 yr-old in is approx. as therapeutic as tubbing with a dolphin. Cheerful tho. 5:16 PM Jun 20th, 2009 from web

What’s most apparent, however, looking back over my tweets, is the isolation and the anger. No one in the supermarket ever asked if I might need help, at the hospital it was worse.

Why do people say things like “you don’t look too happy” to a woman standing alone outside surgery waiting room? 4:56 PM Aug 14th, 2009 from mobile web

I was almost always alone in hospitals, waiting for news from the operating room, waiting at Kevin’s side in the E.R. or by his hospital bed, often watching agonizing pain and struggle for breath. He had epithelioid sarcoma that originated in his pelvis then made its way through the lymph system to his lungs causing repeated collapse on both sides. The cancer itself was inoperable, but its side effects, along with radiation and various experimental chemotherapies, kept the specialists and the baby sitters busy.

Our social circles were small, our families far away. We were our own closest friends, content together, somewhat to our detriment I recognize now. Still, we were introverts not hermits. People are busy, I know. Medical drama is scary. But the ache and fatigue of relentless crisis gets etched in deep. I now view these dispatches as a defiant cry to be seen, to testify, bearing witness to suffering in 140 characters or less.

Kevin out. Surgeon-shoes splattered red-said it was hard but successful. Says he left him with two large tubes, minus couple cups of blood. 4:38 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

The surgeon had put in chest tubes to reinflate the lung, a procedure that gets trickier with repetition, we were told, as the penetrated skin grows thick and crinkly. Finally they let me into the post-anesthesia care unit to sit with him where the nurse drifts close as he slowly shakes off the bliss of unconsciousness.

Obvious I guess but hospitals r so gory. In PACU, neighbor dramatically swallowing blood. Then he laughs & wonders how the other guy (K) is. 6:37 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Never did this become routine for me. I couldn’t read or surf the Net. I sat rigid with anxiety and sorrow, my eyes traveling from the beeping electronic monitors to the tubing that snaked from multiple parts of Kevin’s body to the strong arched cheekbones in his faraway face.

“The other guy” much more peaceful, tho im watching his blood gurgle disconcertingly thru tube. Thankful no twitter while I was giving birth 7:09 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Dismissed to a room on the oncology floor, everything changes. Anesthesia is over. In less than two hours:

Peace turned to pain. Incomprehensible. 8:51 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from mobile web

There were friends and even loving daycare teachers who did take stints with our little ones, 5 and 2 when it all started. But I suppose I was hoping for more of a reaction from my tweets, maybe a SWAT team, though someone said that following me was like watching a distant train wreck through binoculars. What we got was a flurry of casseroles and “How can we help?” queries at the beginning and at the end of a nearly four-year ordeal. One person asked if we’d like bagels. Probably someone showing up with an assortment of poppy, pumpernickel and plain would have felt nice. We didn’t need bagels; we needed people. I didn’t know how to answer, and bagels never came.

I guess “tweeting” is too gentle, like a birdsong rising into the skies. Is there a shouting social network? 9:57 AM Sep 11th, 2009 from mobile web

Panic in the E.R. came in two forms. There was whatever-was-happening-to-Kevin, and there’s me, frantically walking from his curtained cubby to somewhere I could get cell reception, piecing together, while the battery lasted, a complicated plan to get the kids from daycare and school (at times in different towns) and through the evening until I felt OK leaving him. In the order of things, that had to be first. But just once, so early they hadn’t yet diagnosed the problem as cancer, Kevin was having a scary surgery on a Sunday night when the waiting room was ghostly quiet. A friend called. She’d made a plan with the other buddy in our triad. They showed up with knitting and a bottle of wine that we drank surreptitiously from paper cups. I actually laughed through the fear.

Hard being invited to a party, location: casa bon vivancy. People SHOULD celebrate life. But in casa de cancer, you’re living on an island. 9:51 PM Aug 6th, 2009 from web

I put us all in a shop window, and I didn’t make it easy to follow me.

One definition of heartbreak: 9- and 5 1/2-year-olds bending over a bed rail to give a last kiss & say, “I love you Daddy. I’ll miss you.” 5:34 PM Nov 17th, 2009 from web

Sometimes I ask myself if I regret the raw edge of this display. I read mocking reviews of “yet another cancer memoir,” and I wonder if the writer has walked those particular library stacks (that’s how we did it, pre-Amazon, back when I was 28 and my dad was dying of cancer) or paced those hospital floors.

Maybe I did get something I needed from Twitter. With no one’s permission, I gave myself a voice. Sometimes tender, furious or frantic, sometimes quivering with fear from bed in the middle of the night, listening to the too-labored breathing beside me. I needed to say these things and imagine some heart in the Twittersphere absorbing my crazed reality. My tweets may have merited the discreet, embarrassed looking away that we give the seemingly unreachable ranting woman on the train. I’m OK with that.

Since the first surreal days and weeks after Kevin died, my tweets have tapered to barely a trickle, though if I thought he would DM me I would tweet all day.

The first time his birthday came without him, I did post:

Kids and I just launched balloons into the night with glow sticks attached, green light disappearing into the sky. We love you Kevin. 9:22 PM Sep 28, 2010 from web

@leeanncox now turning off #cancer, #death, #widowhood.

Here (.pdf), via Gerstein, is the Public Affairs Office media coverage summary that refers to “1,045 social media conversations about the hearing.” It also notes that “the VOCUS media site listed most of the coverage of Manning as negative, the majority of the coverage about the hearing remains balanced and factual.”

VOCUS, which is based in a Maryland suburb of Washington, offers its customers the ability to “monitor social conversations, mentions and trends,” and:

• Identify influencers. Rank top tweeters and bloggers by the number of followers, retweets, blog comments, and activity volume, so you can see who you need to be talking to.

• Cover more blog posts. Vocus monitors more than 20 million of the most influential blogs. Best of all, we filter out aggregator sites, so you don’t get false or duplicated results.

• Track sentiment and tone. Mentions are analyzed to gauge the feelings of bloggers, tweeters and readers – giving you insight far beyond the lead story.

• Monitor Twitter in near-real time. Find out what people are saying and analyze all the chatter so you can engage within minutes. Vocus makes it easy to track retweets and identify the originating tweet.

Here are a couple sample screenshots of VOCUS software centering on Twitter. I’ve asked the Army how exactly it uses VOCUS and I will update this post if I hear back.

UPDATE 1/11/12: The Army send along this statement in response to my inquiry, which does not shed much light on how it uses VOCUS:

The Army employs traditional and contemporary public relations methods with which to communicate with its varied publics. Our news-gathering and assessment tools are in keeping with modern practices, and are used to determine the level at which we engage with the public to inform our vast constituencies. The Politico report reflects the Army’s connection with the public, and our transparency in such matters.

And then, a few short weeks later, all that “buzz” added up to precisely nothing. So, no, you should not be forgiven for having assumed that Perry had won the Iowa contest. Because if you assumed that, based on “social media buzz,” you’re horrible at forecasting elections and analyzing campaigns. Twitter was the “real-time warning system” for a media-fueled Rick Perry coverage bubble that burst months before anyone actually voted for a 2012 nominee.

Now, thanks to the Post, we will have a real-time map of ill-informed “buzz” from now until the general election. (And until it adjusts its algorithm, Ron Paul will “win” every day, because he’s got a psycho nternet cult.)

This is the distorting effect of minutiae-driven campaign coverage made animate. Here’s the Post again:

There are a few ways Twitter variables, or mentions, can be measured or extrapolated to examine trends in campaigns. Growth in number of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support. A spike in the number of times a candidate is mentioned on Twitter might signal an event that could alter a campaign.

Even as information-free buzz-tracking this tool is flawed, because it fails to distinguish between positive and negative Twitter attention (I’m guessing Perry’s rank on the “leaderboard” would’ve surged when he forgot that third federal agency). Beginning tonight and continuing on through this year we will have an actual leaderboard for the GOP nomination, ranked by votes and delegates instead of retweets, rendering this entire thing even more useless.

The @MentionMachine (what a name) is too silly to get worked up about (sorry!), but it’s decidedly symptomatic of the awfulness of most campaign coverage, which mistakes volume for “grass-roots energy,” suffers from staggering historical amnesia, and regularly insults its audience by putting forth ridiculous speculative bullshit (Donald Trump could win!). This isn’t a call for the press to simply report on “the important stuff” — I find Santorum’s endorsement from the guy with a zillion kids just as gross and interesting as everyone else — it’s just a call to be smart about the dumb stuff. I’d like to know what it means that an old paleo-libertarian crank with a history of embracing conspiracy theories and white populism has a fanatical base of mostly young followers, not that those young followers give him enough “buzz” to win the nomination (they don’t).

Horse race coverage has an audience and a purpose — I’d just like to see it done well.

In her new book, “The Republic of Noise,” New York City public school educator and curriculum advisor Diana Senechal argues that one reason for this problem is the students’ loss of solitude: the ability to think and reflect independently on a given topic. Schools have become more concerned with the business of keeping students busy in what Senechal deems is a flawed attempt to ensure student engagement. But as a result, students are not given the time and space to devote themselves completely to the study and understanding of one specific thing. It’s a need she finds reflected in our culture as a whole: We are a nation glued to smartphones and computer screens, checking email and Twitter feeds in our need to stay in some loop by reading and responding to rolling updates. Senechal is not advocating that we toss out our iPhones or unplug from social media, but rather that we think more slowly, give ourselves time for reflection — as such practice would only serve to enhance the very conversations new media and technology make possible.

Salon spoke to Senechal over the phone about the problems with our educational system, the meaning of solitude, and the dangers of immediacy.

What’s your definition of solitude?

The idea of solitude as an attribute of the mind goes back to antiquity. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus distinguished between a negative sort of isolation (helplessness, removal from others) and the strength that comes from relying on one’s own mental resources. Quintilian wrote about the importance of overcoming distractions through mental concentration and separation. “In the midst of crowds, therefore, on a journey, and even at festive meetings,” he wrote, “let thought secure for herself privacy.”

Solitude is not about being in a hut out in the woods or being out in the desert or living without other people around. I define solitude as a certain apartness that we always have, whether we’re among others or not. It is something that can be practiced — maybe to think just on one’s own, even when in a meeting or in a group and so forth — but that also has been nurtured by time alone. So there’s an ongoing solitude that’s always there, and there’s also a shaped or practiced solitude, which requires both time alone with things, to be thinking about things and working on things, and time among others when you nonetheless think independently.

You’re critical of certain educational philosophies in practice in schools today, especially the workshop model. Why?

The workshop model has an emphasis on group work and a de-emphasis on teacher presentation. What happens is the teacher is supposed to give a mini-lesson which is about 10 minutes long. From there students are supposed to work in groups on something related to that mini-lesson, sometimes independently, but most of the time in groups. At the end they are supposed to share about what they learned. This was mandated across the board, across the grades and subjects, in many schools. Every lesson is supposed to follow a workshop model. (Of course some schools were a little bit more flexible about this than others.)

The problem with that is that the workshop model is very wonderful for certain lessons and topics, but when you apply it across the board, you are constraining the subject matter. You need a variety of approaches in order to deal with a topic. You may need a lesson where the teacher gives an extended presentation to give the students necessary background. Or an extended discussion. For instance, the students may have a project that they will have to do together, but they have to work on their own to build up to that point.

Also, schools have put an enormous emphasis on skills – or what are called skills – at the expense of content. This has been going on for decades. No one wants to specify what students should read, but they say that they should be analyzing and comparing and contrasting. Well, none of this has meaning unless you know what it is you’re comparing and contrasting or analyzing. What happens is, students write essays that show that they haven’t read very closely, and yet this passes because it meets the checks on the checklist: that it has the right number of paragraphs; it has an introduction, body, conclusion; it seems as though they’re comparing something with something. There is a contagious vagueness because we don’t specify what we’re talking about and what students should learn. We then encourage in them a certain vagueness and carelessness. The problem perpetuates itself, and it turns up much later when students enter college and don’t know how to write a coherent essay. Well, the reason this comes up is that they’re in courses where they’re expected to read on specific topics, and that’s where things fall apart and it’s no longer about the rubric.

So the problem lies in the idea of putting the model above the actual subject. You have to think about the subject and think about how you’re going to bring this to the students, and think about the type of lesson that will do that best. Often you’ll find that you need a combination of types of lessons.

Are you advocating for more teacher autonomy?

Yes,  but not for just everyone to do whatever they want. I’m advocating for careful thought about the subject itself.

You write that we “mistake distraction for engagement”? How so? How does it affect even mental cognition?

I’m not a psychologist, but in the classroom and in many discussions on education, what I see is an emphasis on keeping the students busy from start to finish. Not letting a moment creep in where they don’t have something specific to do, something concrete where they are actually producing something. So if you keep them busy, busy, busy, and doing something at every moment, then supposedly they’re engaged. And when supervisors walk into classrooms and look and see the students writing and turning and talking, their conclusion is “Oh! What an engaged class!” The problem with that is then students don’t learn how to handle moments of doubt, or moments of silence, or moments where they have to struggle with a problem and they can’t produce something right on the spot. So, the students themselves come to expect to be put to work at every moment. If you want to give them something more difficult, you have to expect a little uncertainty. You have to expect a little bit of silence, a little bit of an awkward pause where they don’t know exactly what to do right away. What happens in this focus on visible engagement, we lose something that may go deeper, where students may have a chance to wrestle with something that’s a little bit above his or her head and where the answer is not immediately apparent.

This spreads outside the classroom too.

What I see is people having great difficulty sitting with a book for a long time, or with a pad of paper. They want to have the stimulus right nearby – they want access to their email, they want access to their text messages no matter what they’re doing. You see people walking down the street with their phones and just staring at their phones; and you see people holding their phones in all situations – at a concert or when having dinner with a friend – so they can check that they don’t miss anything. Yes, there is a loss of ability to just sit with something.

In trying to instill a greater habit of solitude in educational curricula, how do you see this working in an overcrowded classroom with limited resources? 

That’s also a problem with the workshop lesson. Students won’t necessarily be engaged or be following along. Perhaps the biggest problem you’ll see is some students doing the work and others just following along. You’ll see some students using it as a time to socialize and others taking it seriously. So that problem is going to be there across the board. What students do respond to – and the workshop can be a part of it – is a lesson that makes sense, where they understand that you’re going from point A to point B. They understand that now that they have a grasp on this material, you’re going to take them here with it.

How do we then measure how well a student is learning and progressing, and do so as early as possible?

That’s where content-specific tests come in. Where we’ve gone astray is with tests that test quite general skills – you know, reading comprehension tests. There isn’t a good way to prepare for those tests, so we have a rather amorphous program of literacy where students learn all kinds of reading strategies but the emphasis is not on reading concrete things. You can test students on their reading of the subject matter, and not just factual knowledge, but their understanding. But then you have to have an actual course with actual subject matter taught, and you have to have a test that is about that course.

Math is a different case, and that’s why we see more progress with math than with English-language arts, because there is more of a math curriculum. But even with math, many districts have curricula that just jump from topic to topic so that students don’t go deep into any topic. [Students] learn how to do all sorts of different things, but they don’t know how to do them especially well. Tests have a role, but the curriculum has to come first.

Do you think we are overemphasizing the need to have a standardized method of teaching or testing?

Yes and no. There has to be a certain need for standardized tests to compare from state to state, and district to district, and get a measure of what’s going on across the board.  And because it’s politically close to impossible to agree on a common curriculum, it probably would not be a good idea to have a very specific national curriculum. Those tests are going to be on the general side, but because of that, they should not be the be-all and end-all. Because they are so general, they should not match what the curriculum actually is. The curriculum should be much richer, and the tests that go along with that curriculum should be given more importance.

What has been found in many cases is when a school actually does not hold those tests so high, doesn’t put them on a pedestal but instead teaches a curriculum that is very considered, substantial and valuable, the students end up doing very well on the [standardized] tests. One must, in a sense, go beyond the test to do well on them.

You write about what you see as our obsession with the idea of success and our desire to do away with failure. What do we lose in the process of striving for success?

There is nothing wrong with striving for success at something meaningful. But if the emphasis is on the success and not on the thing being accomplished, the latter almost inevitably gets reduced. You can be successful if you make the task easy enough or lower the standards enough. You can feel good about it temporarily and get temporary approval or applause. But it is much more valuable, in the end, to accomplish something concrete, even if it doesn’t manifest itself as success for a long time.

For instance, a student is having difficulty with fractions. Well, that student should work on fractions until that student feels comfortable and fluent with them. But the talk emphasizes that “the student succeeds.” We hear about successful schools, successful students, successful people and so forth. Usually this means having some attainment of high stature, high score or high salary. The true accomplishments come often in the absence of these immediate, visible results; and if you sit and work with a subject, or you sit and struggle with a language, you may go for months without feeling you’re succeeding necessarily, but what you’re getting is something that won’t go away. Over time, after that constant practice and struggle, you find that you have attained something: You come to know that language. So the attention must go to the thing itself that you’re trying to do.

“It’s always wrong, that’s obvious, but I’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she’ll get.”

While covering the Egyptian protests back in February, CBS reporter Lara Logan was separated from her crew and endured a horrifying sexual and physical assault. And when the news filtered out from Tahrir Square, New York University Center for Law and Security fellow Nir Rosen fired off a torrent of scathing tweets about the attack, admitting “She’s so bad that I ran out of sympathy for her,” and adding “it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson [Cooper] too.” In the wake a furious backlash, Rosen swiftly deleted the tweets, apologized for his words, and resigned from NYU. Today, he’s back on Twitter after a brief sabbatical, but as he wrote for Salon last winter, “with 480 characters I undid a long career.”

“Face it folks, you just feel better when you say it. #WINNING”

Believe it or not, before March, Twitter was a Charlie Sheen-free zone. But in the midst of his epic spat with the producers of “Two and a Half Men,” the guy with more catch phrases than a Bond villain took his Vatican warlock assassin fingertips and tiger blood to tweet town. He immediately set a Guinness world record for “Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers” and an unofficial one for least coherent stream of consciousness. Remember, world, “You already own you. Now go… Earn the power.”

“What do Japanese Jews like to eat? Hebrew National Tsunami.”

Gilbert Gottfried, the man who helped bring the concept of “too soon” into the lexicon lived up to his reputation in March, when he unleashed a slew of one-liners about the devastation in Japan. In the aftermath, he wasn’t just all but universally condemned – he lost his gig as the voice of the Aflac duck. The company had to issue a distancing statement that the tweets “were lacking in humor,” and Gottfried himself quickly announced that “I meant no disrespect, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families.” The whole episode — which he discussed in a Salon exclusive interview — proved that when you bomb in a club, it’s a bad night. But when you bomb on Twitter, it can cost you your job.

“Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

When Pakistan IT consultant Sohaib Athar heard some unusual activity going on in the middle of a May night, he took to Twitter to talk about it. “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty,” he wrote, adding a few minutes later that “all silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too… the helicopter is gone too… Must be a complicated situation.” It was indeed. As Athar told the world the next day, “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.” And with that, the musings of one sleepy guy who wished he had a “giant fly swatter” to silence the noise became an eyewitness to the American raid on the compound of Osama bin Laden.

“im retiring Video: http://bit.ly/kvLtE3 #ShaqRetires”

Sure, he expanded on it in the accompanying video, but not much. When the legendary basketball player Shaquille O’Neal decided to end his nearly two-decade career in June, he wanted to “tell you first” – you being the Twitterverse. And with a post so pithy it didn’t even bother with the apostrophe, he was done.

“Touche Prof Moriarity. More Weiner Jokes for all my guests! #Hacked!”

Except he hadn’t been hacked. That unfortunate crotch shot, we learned back in June, was indeed the bulge of New York congressman Anthony Weiner. In the fact of mounting evidence that no hack occurred, he admitted a few days after the damning image emerged that “The picture was of me, and I sent it” to college student Gennette Cordova. It was the inauspicious end of a political career, and Weiner’s Twitter timeline as well. Lesson – if you insist on sending ladies pictures of your junk, stick to texting.

“September 17th. Wall Street. Bring Tent. http://bit.ly/re9ENL #OCCUPYWALLSTREET”

A worldwide movement began as a simple plea back in July, when Adbusters, inspired by the protests in Egypt, issued the call. There had been a poster in the July issue of the magazine, and a fiery blog post to “you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there.” But it was the power of the hashtag that soon made itself known, as an action became a revolution. Occupy Seattle. Occupy Tuscaloosa. Occupy London. Occupy Hong Kong. Occupy Antarctica. And behold the power of tents and tweets.

“Who’s #notguilty about eating all the tasty treats they want?” and “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo.”

Corporate outreach gone terribly, terribly wrong! When the Casey Anthony verdict broke in July, #notguilty skyrocketed straight to the top of Twitter trends. With a better sense of how to make a delicious crumb cake than what’s going on in the news, baked goods brand Entenmann’s leapt in with an out of context – and wildly inappropriate — hashtag. The tweet was soon deleted, with a follow-up that “Our #notguilty tweet was insensitive, albeit completely unintentional. We are sincerely sorry.” And even the ever-provocative Kenneth Cole went too far with a February tweet about the Egyptian protests. Cole likewise quickly scrubbed the tweet, with a message that “We weren’t intending to make light of a serious situation.”

“Dear Fox News, don’t play our music on your evil fucking channel ever again. Thank you”.

Apparently Maroon 5′s Adam Levine is not a fan. When the network used a soundbite of the band’s “She Will Be Loved” on an October edition of “Fox & Friends,” Levine took aim at the cable behemoth in a way that was both fearless and bitchy. While the network decorously didn’t reply, give feistiness points to its Andy Levy, who shot back via Twitter, “Dear @AdamLevine, don’t make crappy f*cking music ever again. Thank you.” #ohsnap

“How do you fire Jo Pa #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste.”

What is it about these “Two and a Half Men” stars? In November, Kutcher responded to the dismissal of legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno with a kneejerk expression of outrage. But Paterno, as the rest of the world knew and Kutcher later sussed out, lost his job over his lackluster response to sex abuse accusations against his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Kutcher quickly admitted, “I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” But then he then compounded the error by announcing he’d decided “to turn the management of the [Twitter] feed over to my team at Katalyst as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content.” And how’s that been going? “I will forever cherish the time I spent with Demi. Marriage is one of the most difficult things in the world and unfortunately sometimes they fail,” he tweeted soon after. “Love and Light, AK.” Ewwww.

“I have breast cancer. I am in good hands. There is a long road ahead and it leads to happiness and a cancer-free, long, healthy life.”

Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin lives her life online. So naturally, she live tweeted her first mammogram, or as she cheerfully put it, “the perky robot pancake boobs squisher machine game.” But just a short time and several tweets later, she gave the stark news. Since then, Jardin’s been ferociously tweeting from the new land of cancer. And whether she’s posting about data mix-ups or referring to her MRI tube as “an industrial music dance party,” she’s proving every day the inspirational, and very healing, power of online community.