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Tommy Christopher, White House Correspondent, Live-Tweets His Heart Attack

by Matthew Zuras on September 7, 2010 at 01:10 PM

tommy christopher heart attack tweet
Tommy Christopher, a White House correspondent for Mediaite and owner of Daily Dose, had a heart attack on Sunday. So, presumably after calling 911, he took to Twitter to write: "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" A minute later, he updated his condition, tweeting "Paramedics think I will live." Emboldened by his optimistic prognosis, he tweeted again, less than 30 minutes later, "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar [sic]."

Our knee-jerk reaction was shocked, mild disgust that someone might be so concerned about their social networking account that they would post minute-by-minute updates on their emergency medical condition. But Christopher is a journalist, and presumably comfortable with immediate reporting under pressure. But does his live-tweeting about a heart attack augur the death of decorum in communication, or stand alone as a man's possible final words in the face of his own demise?

We've written about instances of "oversharing" on social networks, including the groom who paused his wedding ceremony to change his relationship status on Facebook. (Our outraged readers had a field day with that one.) Even more sordidly, it turns out that a sizable share of social networking users love to hop online immediately after sex. And the Internet exploded with incredulity after Penelope Trunk, writer and CEO for Brazencareerist.com, woodenly updated her Twitter account in the midst of her miscarriage.

When we talk about Internet oversharing, we enter a debate about what constitutes appropriate public speech. Prior to the invention of social networking, was it considered acceptable to make light of your heart attack or miscarriage in polite conversation? The lines have been blurred, of course, by both the immediacy of updates and the fact that online postings are a kind of mass communication, frequently to people unknown by the author/speaker. Whereas one might be able to joke about their cardiac arrest to friends and confidantes, the average group of Twitter followers is made up colleagues and random lurkers.

Christopher's condition is unknown, but, judging from his latest updates, he at least appears to be physically stable. (And still trying to keep himself in good spirits, writing yesterday: "To everyone who said 'are you serious?' I belatedly reply 'As a heart attack!'") But we wonder if technology is moving faster than our common standards of etiquette can, either undoing the moment of reflection inherent in previous modes of mass communication, or simply catching us off guard with the unvarnished immediacy of the present.

Tags: oversharing, PenelopeTrunk, SocialEtiquette, TommyChristopher, TommyChristopherTwitter, top, twitter, web

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