I was just watching a news story about a girl whose father was Chief Steward on Malaysian Flight 370, the plane that has disappeared over the Indian Ocean. Not knowing whether her father is alive or dead, not know how to reach him but needing to connect, needing to believe he can hear her, she turned to Twitter.
She lets her father know he’s missing his favorite football game, the one they always watch together. She tweets raw feelings: “Daddy, come home. I miss you.” She sends the tweets out into the vague, everywhere-ness of the Internet. Isn’t it just possible that somewhere, she thinks, somehow, in this vast, airy endless space, he might hear her?
We often make fun of Twitter as 144 characters of trivia. But a few words in the hands of strong emotion can be so much more.