This week, Kaitlyn Tiffany and I are coming in hot with a take: celebrity death Twitter is bad. On today’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button?, we ask if there’s a proper way to mourn a celebrity’s death, particularly on Twitter. Is it really an authentic message when someone tweets, “oh no,” along with the news of a celebrity’s death? Does it even matter if the message is authentic?
We chat with a bunch of guests for this one: Ashley Feinberg, a reporter at Slate; Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet and author; Sidney Gish, a musician; and, finally, Timothy Recuber, an assistant professor of sociology at Smith College who specializes in mass media, digital culture, and emotions. Without giving away too much, Recuber tells us that, actually, celebrity Twitter might be minimized in the future, as influencer and micro-celebrities become more prominent. Something to look forward to!
Listen to the episode above, and you can subscribe to the show anywhere you typically get your podcasts. To make it easy for you, we’ve also got our usual places linked: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and our RSS feed. I should also note that this is the final episode in our Death Online series, so if you missed the first two episodes about preparing for your online death and the death of Jibo, check those out, too.
Why’d You Push That Button? /
A podcast about the hard, weird choices technology forces us to make.