Anthony Weiner’s press conference was a sad event, and not just for him. When he spoke about “followers” and “tweeting,” it was with an uncomfortable ease, as if they are words that belong in the political discourse—and perhaps they do. During the event, the most entertaining coverage (if also the most toxic) occurred on Twitter, where thousands of tweets went out with jokes, observations, and instant reactions. I say that it’s toxic not because the people were especially malicious. Many were hilarious, and deployed their wit almost instantly. (The author and internet analyst Evgeny Morozov said, “If I were Eliot Spitzer, I’d already be worrying about my TV job”; the novelist and essayist Colson Whitehead remarked, “On the plus side, Gillette has just asked Weiner to be their celebrity spokesman.”) Others were thoughtful, and saw the event as an uncomfortable piece of theatre in which private apologies were lumped in with public ones. (Ben Smith, from Politico, cited a reader’s e-mail that noted that this was the “1st 21st Century political sex scandal in that it is the only scandal that could not have happened in the last century.”) Others still wondered about Andrew Breitbart’s hijacking of the event; second-guessed reporters’ questions; read, sometimes sensitively, every one of Weiner’s breaths and swallowed sobs.
But the intelligent use of social media to frame Weiner’s misadventures in social media raise the question, again, of whether the online world has too much downside for anyone with any level of public exposure. Weiner is one of the younger members of Congress, which means, demographically, that he’s among the most likely to use Twitter and Facebook. Which means, also, that he’s among the most likely to have his less admirable behaviors digitally fixed for maximum embarrassment. The picture in question was posted and deleted almost immediately. It was caught only because Weiner was already being surveilled, though we may not want to call it that. Of course, as it turns out, it’s part of a broader pattern: as everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to John Edwards has taught us, there’s almost no such thing as an isolated incident. I made a joke during the press conference, on Twitter, that we shouldn’t forget the real victims—the hackers Weiner unfairly accused. But there’s a way in which there is a broader class of victims, not only the public officials who have to watch their every step, possibly at the expense of focussing on governance, but also the millions of private citizens who now form some kind of unholy panopticon, watching for a misstep so that we can get in on the conversation (and the spotlight). There’s such a thing as legitimate scrutiny, but is this it?
Weiner’s Twitter account is still up, with about twenty thousand more followers than before, though his tweets leave off after a post from last week in which he notes that he’s going to discuss Donald Trump’s practice of eating pizza with a fork. But it’s the penultimate message that’s the most ominous: “Sorry for all the unwanted attention on #WeinerYes follows. I didn’t mean to make you famous. #CollateralDamage.” The clever-but-tragic hash tags, not to mention the truly bizarre use of the word “famous,” illuminates the problem much better than anything else in Weinergate.
