Amy Winehouse and Performing grief

I must first state for the record two things: the death of Amy Winehouse is tragic. She burnt herself out, as the brightest flames often do, and although I bought none of her records, yet I well remember how she provided the soundtrack to life, everywhere I went in bars, clubs and living rooms, for many years.

The second thing I need to say is that 'performative' emotion is not really my field, so my views may seem underdeveloped, obvious and lacking maturity. Thus, I need to explain myself. The reason I am writing is because I found something today which really irritated me, on the BBC website:

'Close friend Kelly Osbourne paid tribute to Winehouse via micro-blogging site Twitter. "Cant even breath right my now im crying so hard I just lost 1 of my best friends. I love you forever Amy & will never forget the real you," she said.'

I don't wish to question that Miss Osborne feels grief, but I want to know how this 'tweet' is a 'tribute' to '1 of [her] best friends'? As far as I can tell, this 'tweet' is an advert for Miss Osborne: how close she was to this fallen star, so close that only she will 'never forget the real' Amy; how violently the news has affected her, to the point where she 'can't even breath' through her tears; and how, even having lost Amy in the undiscovered country, their bond endures into the next life, addressing her directly 'I love you forever Amy'.

No tribute to her talents, no thoughts for her parents and family, no mention of Amy's character, flaws and perfections - no, this is all Kelly Osborne, laying it on thick.

I take her as the example of the moment, but in this regard she is hardly extraordinary. I doubt, even, that it is a phenomenon unique to our age, the tendency to hijack other's tragedies for self publication. It is undeniably much easier to do and to spot now, for the social media has brought private thoughts and feelings into the public domain; this blog is a case in point. The difference now is not so much the medium as the audience: views are now news.

The first time I noticed this was with the recent attacks in Norway: I spotted the BBC had trawled the Internet for reaction tweets. Every news item can be 'shared' across the social networks. Every news item has a comments box; I can understand the comments facility on the editors' blogs, where opinion may meet with opinion, but why an item of news requires it is less apparent. Either way, news is now not news until it has been visibly discussed.

In this regard, it is hardly surprising that 'tweets', the immediate reactions on the ground, now form part of the story. To make a Day Today formula: events + reaction = news (which means fact into doubt now goes very well indeed). The discussion of news is nothing new, of course, and has always been the essential means of a story's dissemination and survival.

The effect, however, of so directly involving reactions, of consciously embedding into the very fabric of the delivered news the commentary of the people, is that there ensues a kind of anarchy: too many voices competing for your ears. How many hundreds of thousands of tweets are yet to tweet upon poor Amy? How few will be noticed? Here's the rub: people don't comment or tweet to be ignored, they wish to be heard. In order to be heard in such a noisy place, you have to scream.

The effect is, I believe, a certain presumption: of course people want to hear what I have to say! To return a moment to Miss Osborne, before the days of Twitter, she would have had to wait for the television crew to arrive at her house, or have had audaciously to make her way to the studio, in order to display to the world just how unique was her bond with poor Amy. It would have been worth the wait, too, for the cameras and sound equipment would have done the work for her, recording her struggling for breath through her tears. The problem is that that relies on others' consent: for example, the editor might not want Kelly's histrionics, he might want instead to feature Victoria Beckham paying tribute to a fellow artist. The tweet, however, is Miss Osborne giving us her grief sans invitation. It assumes that the audience is there, that the audience is waiting for her , that it will listen when she speaks and respond thereto. At no point was she asked, and at no point does that matter.

The problem that arises from this is, I think, really quite serious. Rather than waiting for someone to ask, 'what do you think?' Kelly started with 'here is what I think'. When that becomes the common starting point, the result is that conversation ceases, and the noise of the tweets, that white noise of cyberscreams, is really people talking past each other rather than to each other, not hearing yet expecting to be heard. Miss Osborne's misnominated 'tribute' is her screaming, and its republication on the BBC is her being heard, but only in the capacity of news - there is one speaker, and one listener, there is no interaction between two people, two ideas or two camps. As her strong hints of closed intimacy suggest, the voices of others will hardly matter to her. She isn't listening.

Well, we needn't follow her example, for we can help to break this spell by listening, even when we dislike what she says.