Andrew Gombert / EPA
I’m writing on deadline for next week’s print TIME magazine, so in lieu of a fresh blog post right now, here’s the thing I wrote for this week’s print version of TIME, a.k.a., “My last thing I am writing about Anthony Weiner, I promise, I think.”
My recent column places Weiner in the recent but already storied history of celebrity twimmolations, which I posted about on this blog back in March: instances of people undoing themselves in one quick, careless moment on social media.
I hope the takeaway from this whole incident isn’t “be very, very afraid of using Twitter”; as I say in the column, I have 8,000-plus tweets to show I think otherwise. But there is an irony, and a caution in that the qualities that make someone rewarding to follow on social media (irreverence, transparency, fleet unfiltered thinking, willingness to engage) can–taken to their self-destructive extreme–turn into the kind of things that get people in trouble on social media (offensiveness, oversharing, lack of impulse control, willingness to “engage”).
Of course, there are twimmolations and there are twimmolations: a Congressman accidentally posting a sexual photo publicly is not a comedian crossing the line with a joke, is not a journalist tweeting an opinion that makes her bosses uncomfortable. But Weiner’s quick-draw, pugnacious style on Twitter had gotten attention in and of itself before the sexting story.
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an interview with Weiner conducted a few weeks ago, prompted by this very question: did he worry about getting himself in hot water with an impulsive tweet? (The question, at the time, was words not images.) Besides his foreshadowing behavior (interviewed at a coffeshop, the congressman “turned around in an exaggerated pantomime to eye a provocatively dressed waitress”), Weiner acknowledged, “With absolutely metaphysical certitude, I will say that I will offend somebody or make a mistake once in a while. I won’t always be politically correct, and I’m sorry in advance.”
“Certitude.” The rest is repeated history.