Twitter Cares? Using Twitter to Care About, Care for and Care With Women Who Have Had Abortions

Authors

  • Sara L Puotinen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/irie206

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Angie Jackson and her live-tweeting of her abortion and Step Herold, and development of the #ihadanabortion hashtag, used twitter to practice empathy-as-care. Challenging the perception, fueled by newspaper reports, television news segments, popular accounts of scientific studies and academic articles, that twitter strips us of our empathy and makes us uncaring and apathetic, I explore how Angie Jackson’s live-tweet and Steph Herold’s hashtag enabled users to care about, care for and care with women who have had abortions. While the caring practices that these projects allowed for were tenuous, fleeting and not always successful, their presence on twitter indicates that social media like twitter have the potential to enable us to care and should be taken seriously as spaces with ethical value.

Downloads

Published

2011-12-01

How to Cite

Puotinen, Sara L. 2011. “Twitter Cares? Using Twitter to Care About, Care for and Care With Women Who Have Had Abortions”. The International Review of Information Ethics 16 (December). Edmonton, Canada:79-84. https://doi.org/10.29173/irie206.

Issue

Vol. 16 (2011): Ethics of Online Social Networks

Section

Article

License

Under the CC-BY 4.0 license, you have the right to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.