Twitter, which you may or may not like, which you may or may not use, which you may or may not have integrated into all your other and various social networking sites – is going to be opened up to the MSN and Google search engines.

This means that whatever you say on twitter has the possibility of appearing in a search results page.

Twitter, like most status updates, contains an estimated content of about 40% ads, 15% political agenda and about 40% sheer babbling drivel.

The most common complaint is “I don’t want to now that you just got out of the shower and made a cup of coffee.”

True.

But…

Let me tell you about me and Twitter. I use consultants on a yearly basis to help me shape and refine my goals and internet presence because, after all, the books and cds I put out I would like to sell. If I go some where to read, I would like people to show up because it helps to support me and keep me going. One consultant brought up twitter (when it was still fairly new) and told me I should start doing it because it would be the only thing that would allow people who read or saw my work to remain connected to me as a person as my life “gets bigger.” It would prevent me from turning into the commodity and let me continue learning and connecting to others because they would be able to see the “me” in everything I do. So even when I am writing essay length blogs, lining to newsy and so on…no one (or not many) would lose sight of the fact that a real person was writing these things and in that realization, your mind remains more open  - sort of a “if she could say or do this, then what would I do or say?”

But, for it to be able to do that, the tweets themselves cannot be superficial or written in a way that they “hold a distance.”

When we are constantly trying to present an image or hold things at bay the end result is that not only do we get dismissed as “just another addie” but that we begin to erode our ability to speak in a manner in which we are truly expressing ourselves.

I am still working on how to use twitter…its like when I started the blog, the first year was really bumpy because you are trying to (like dating) get used to someone.

But, I m slowly getting the hang of it. The prospect of it leaving my little portion of the world and going out every and anywhere is a little daunting. Suddenly I want to use proper grammar and spell things right and be stunningly brilliant with each chirp – but that is not reality. And more and more I am thinking that, while not everything needs to be shared in great detail, the sharing of our realities is going to play an important part in shaping the future differently.

The sharing of our realities plays an important part in our making connections in the present as well.

There is a woman, Kim Brittingham, a writer and blogger who I have a great deal of respect and who I basically would consider a “body activist” – she talks, blogs, writes and tweets about obesity, fatism, age-ism and more. She did a really interesting thing a while back in which she created a fake article/website with the title (and this is probably wrong but it gets the gist of it) “Is fat contagious? Can sitting next to a fat person make you fat?”

And then Kim tracked the number of hits to that article and it was a tremendous amount.

She also stepped in a pile of steaming doo-doo by comparing in a (tweet or status update I am not sure) the experience of being fat in today’s society as comparable to the experience of Jews in the Holocaust.

STOP…BREATHE…DO NOT REACT and keep on reading

And, shall we say, a lively discussion ensued – little of which had to do with the reality of the experience she was talking about and much with the metaphor she chose to express it in.

The metaphor was off and/or poorly timed for use – the Holocaust speaks of the time during WWII when Jews were being killed in camps and ditches and so on. Kim, I think, was referring to what was happening prior to the implementation of the Final Plan when the Jews were being shut out of life solely based upon what they were.

In America, when we talk fat, we talk cost and looks and health. We talk choices and lifestyles and surgeries. It is near to impossible for an American to understand the daily experience of someone who is overweight in our culture (unless you are and even then it is not encouraged and most think they are alone) because our education on the subject (as provided by the media) is focused mostly on “Get a hold of yourself! Change!”

In the EU, there has begun to be a balancing call in the media from doctors, activists and healthcare providers to begin to pay attention to the way the overweight are being ostracized, harassed, denied employment and discriminated against in daily life. There are several brilliant articles on the BBC online about this.

But what makes them so brilliant are the comments posted. Small messages from real people speaking about their experience; being flat out told they are too fat for a job, taunted in public places, denied access to things. That is a voice that is lacking here. The choices we have are “Change or Die!” or “Big is Beautiful!”

And nothing is as easy or black or white as that, now is it? And both of those messages are balanced and polished products.

The voice that makes this cultural and societal discussion real is missing. It is easy to make policy decisions concerning a group of people if you have no sense of balancing reality about them. If you cannot see the person within the group.

Is obesity a result of a lifestyle choice, disease, disorder or is it genetic? Who the hell knows? Within 5 minutes I could post links to medical surveys that would support each argument. How overweight can you be before it impacts your health and begins to cost taxpayers money? Again, give me 2 minutes and I can trot out supporting “evidence” for both.

What I do know is that for quite a few, the process of becoming overweight originates in their environment reflecting back to them an attitude that re-enforces a negative sense of self worth or some other type of fear within. And I do know that the leap then made is wrong – that being slim reflects a positive sense of self worth. It does not. As does the conclusion that all overweight persons have deep issues of self worth, many do not.

What I do know is that we do not have a right to discriminate, harass or dismiss anyone based upon their appearance and our underlying assumptions about the whys and wherefors. Somebody’s appearance is none of our business unless it is an obvious sign of a pathological morbidity and let me tell you, there are few who fall into that category.

It is embarrassing and shameful that in the discussion of health we are creating an environment in which we are allowing a “sub-human” group to be defined. By this I mean we are using a discussion of what it means to be healthy not to examine our own lives and efforts, but to identify a group of people (who are not even really similar) as less than and creating a cultural acceptance of discrimination towards them.

If, we truly value health, if we truly are interested in preventing obesity in children because it will eventually strain healthcare costs etc and so forth then, the logic follows that creating an even greater social strain upon them is not the way to do it. 

And we, as a country, are just too ethically maladjusted to handle mixed messages about who is acceptable based on appearances. We tend to take the first sentence, throw out the rest of the report and run with it.

Oh my god…look at the time…

(comment by Heather Moon Solanz) I was watching an interview with Michael Pollan on PBS the other night. I personally think the man is a genius. He was asked the age old question, How come people used to eat bacon and eggs every day and they didn't get fat? His answer? People used to eat quality food. Today's food is a chemistry experiment. Highly processed and layered with fat, sugar, and salt, designed to rewire your brain because processed food is salient. As a result of this knowledge, there is kind of a grass roots effort going on, bringing back backyard and commmunity gardens, because people are starting to want real food again, not palatable food-like substances. I think it's great. I hope the movement takes off.

The focus about health, I think, has gotten so totally off track and become about perception and the person as a salable commodity rather than what helps an individual thrive. You'd think with all our electricity and refrigeration that fresh would trump processed but somehow we have been sold on the fact that processed is better. What is printed on the package (and there are some really unrealistic claims on them) dictates more than common sense. But it is all tangled in this...avoidance of complexity....people are very complex and yet we are hell bent on trying to use shorthand to understand them.

(comment by anonymous) I think you are right, I went to the BBC site and found at least some of the articles (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8314125.stm) and you would never see that here

(comment by Brightfire Woman) I hold the opinion that, sincerely, the people with the problem where weight is concerned are the ones that have a distaste, disgust, disdain for it and that they are commonly pound battlers themselves, dieting and exercising to maintane a wieght that maybe 5 to 30 lower than where their body would be comfortable. They hold the opinion that it is all the person's fault in that they are lazy and eating like pigs without any attempt at self control, and they feel superior putting these people down ...not realizing they have control issues and are body image obsessed.

The whole processed food thing, well, it is all still an individual choice thing, all the options are there, the natural and organic is higher because the demand is lower. A product that does not sell soon has a discontinued sticker. Public choice determines rather that product is the organic whole food or processed boxed. What we need is tax incentives and awards that will allow healthy whole to have an equal comparative pricing until they reach a competitive volume in the market place.