Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Finding RSS Feed Links in New Twitter.

I've been trying to add some twitter things to my google reader today, and finding the RSS feeds for things is suddenly a lot harder, with new twitter.

So, for anyone else wondering, here's what I've got.

If you want to get the RSS feed for twitter search results, so you want the feed to register each new mention of a search term, you use this URL, http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=feminism but replace 'feminism' at the end with whatever search you want. Add that URL to your RSS reader, google reader, or whatever you use, and it should work.

The other thing I wanted was the RSS feed URLs for certain twitter accounts. These used to appear below the list of people the account was following, but not any more. Until you log out. So you have to log out, go to that person's account page, and the RSS feed link will be below the images of the people the account follows, in the right sidebar. Then, log back in and do whatever you were doing, but you have the feed URL now.

Hope that helps someone out! It's been frustrating.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out To Get You.

The media rhetoric around, and the threatened government cuts to, disability benefits are filling people with fear. They are contributing to deep suspicion and even aggression from the general public towards disabled people, and lots of us are feeling more than a little petrified.

From Nadine Dorries' Shop a Twit campaign, to virtually everything put out by the Daily Mail, many disabled people are becoming scared to go out, to have occasional treats, to try something normally outside of their limits, such as walking a few steps, or to put their name to anything they post on the internet at all, in case someone should see them, report them for benefit fraud, and accuse them of 'faking it'.

Of those who have continued to post on twitter, despite previous threats, many feel more limited about what they can say, lest they are judged to be faking, scrounging, or wasting taxpayers' money. Still more are finding they feel they have to justify everything they say, just in case somebody is watching. And programmes like the BBC's Saints and Scroungers do little to help, either people's attitudes, or the overriding fear and paranoia experienced by disabled benefit claimaints.

So I was saddened, but not surprised, to see one person's response to this build-up of fear.
I started to worry that my heavy use of twitter could be used against me in this process. I have already explained how and why I can use twitter without that meaning that I am fit to work, but I also worried that my tweets could easily be taken out of context. For example, a tweet about undertaking an activity of some sort could be used as proof that I can do that all the time. What an investigator would not see is how good or bad a day I was having, how much I had to prepare for and work around the activity, or how much pain and exhaustion that activity would cause for days afterwards.

So Steven Sumpter, aka latent existence, took, "the drastic step of deleting all 12,272 of my tweets". All of them. And why? Fear. Fear they would be used against him. Fear that they would portray an image of him actually being fine. Now, I follow him on twitter, and it's not like he's endlessly talking of weekends away skiing and trekking up mountains, and decided he'd better suddenly get rid of the evidence. This is the twitter account of someone who is clearly not well enough to work. This is someone who talks about a good day being when they open their curtains 'without fleeing in pain from the light'.

This someone who nobody could accuse of faking it. Anyone with a chronic illness can recognise straight away that these aren't a series of made-up tweets by someone imagining what it might be like to be ill, and even so he felt so threatened by the current atmosphere of suspicion and attack, that deleting over 12,000 tweets felt like the only way forward.

But he's not the only one scared. It's not a paranoid or psychotic illness which is making him have these suspicions, some of the most mentally healthy people I know concur with him. And I want our progressive, equal society to take a look at itself, and wonder just how progressive and equal it is.

(Cross posted at Where's the Benefit? blog).

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Threats and Fear.

It's impossible to overstate how terrified some disabled people are, in Britain right now.

The fear of benefit cuts is so high, and so real, and attitudes like those of Nadine Dorries add to the climate of terror.

Already people are scared to leave their house for fear of being reported to the DWP for faking their illness, now those who find networks like twitter to be a lifeline are becoming frightened to post.

If you are stuck in bed, and you've found a way to use your laptop lying down, or you can use a phone or iPad, sites like twitter are perhaps the only way for many to actually communicate with others. It may be the only conversation someone has for a week.

One purpose that these threats serve is, I suspect, to keep us all quiet. We can't complain about the process of reapplying for DLA, or of the ATOS assessments, if the very complaints we type will be used as an additional stick to beat us with. Even if typing those 140 characters used up so much energy that we then had to sleep for an hour to recover. Or hurt our eyes so much that we have a migraine for 3 days.

On days that I can't leave the house, and can't use the phone, the internet is the only tool I have to communicate with the outside world. I don't want to lose that. But the fear affects me as much as anyone, and right now so many of my outlets feel threatening.

This is what the threats to disability benefits are doing to me. It is worsening my madness significantly, which, ironically, will make me less and less able to work, not more.

(cross-posted at Where's the Benefit?)

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

12 Reasons I Won't Follow You Back on Twitter

You are unlikely to get a refollow if...

1. You post about diets.

2. Your posts are in a language I don't speak.

3. You post about gaining thousands of followers in a night, and you have a total of 34 followers.

4. You are following more than 10x the number of people who are following you.

5. You follow, unfollow, refollow, unfollow and refollow me so that I get notifications about you in my email several times a day.

6. You are any kind of spammer or bot.

7. Your posts are hidden. I don't want to request permission when I don't know what it's for.

8. You have no profile information.

9. Your profile information is inane.

10. You are sharing the love of Jesus.

11. Hate speech. Pretty much any.

12. You like Jeremy Clarkson.

Otherwise, go for it! So, follow me if you dare!

Saturday, December 05, 2009

A Tweet Too Far?

My fourth guest post at the F Word.

As an avid tweeter, I'm not sure how I missed this story when it actually happened, but I became aware of it about a week ago.

Penelope Trunk, a woman in America, was widely condemned after sending the following tweet:
I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a f**ked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

The main criticisms aimed against her seemed to be that:

1. it was insensitive to those who had had miscarriages and were devastated about it,
2. that it was an inappropriately detailed message, which her many followers did not want to read, and
3. that she was heartless and abortions are bad.

I think these are all different points, and the former certainly has more validity as a criticism. A miscarriage can be an utterly awful experience for a woman who wants the baby. And indeed women who aren't sure. There is huge grief, loss, fear and hopelessness. Penelope Trunk herself has experienced such a miscarriage, and said on her blog
there are many women who want the baby and have a miscarriage. I was one of them. I cried for days. I get it.

In a blog post at the time, she said
I am four months pregnant. But the baby is dead, inside me, and must be removed. I am devastated. I always knew this could happen, in the back of my mind. But you are never prepared for something like this to happen.

This is not a heartless woman talking! In defending her tweet, she says,
To all of you who said I should not be happy about having a miscarriage: You are the ones short on empathy. Any woman who is pregnant but wishes she weren’t would of course be grateful when she has a miscarriage. [...]

But if you have ever had an abortion, which I have, you would know that a miscarriage is preferable to an abortion. Even the Pope would agree with that.

It is clearly a difficult area to negotiate. Some women are devastated at miscarriages, others are relieved. I suspect that very few women who are relieved feel able to speak out about this, their fears confirmed by the attacks on Ms Trunk.

But if you have just miscarried a wanted child, I can only imagine how awful it would be to have read it.

On to point 2, it was detail that people did not want to know, it was gory and personal, and who wants to hear the details of that?

This is where I defend Ms Trunk absolutely. Women's bodily functions are normal and natural, not dirty and shameful. I talk openly about my periods, about the joys of using washable sanitary towels, and about having endometriosis and PCOS and the problems that come with that. About spending 4 days of each cycle in agony and unable to move. About the amount of blood that comes out.

As a teenager I was as coy about it as everyone else my age was. But then after several years of medical tests, investigations, interventions and surgery, I realised that it was ridiculous that I was not supposed to talk about *that*, whereas if the problems I was experiencing were in most other parts of my body, people would not shrink away from hearing the details.

For centuries, women have been taught that their periods, along with other 'women's things' should be kept quiet. And why should they? One of my favourite things is reading feminist radical menstruation writings and looking round the Museum of Menstruation site. Partly because I like breaking patriarchy's rules, and partly because it is fascinating.

I have no doubt that while some people would prefer I kept it all quiet, I have every right to talk about bleeding, and I will continue to do so.

Why, then, should Ms Trunk *not* talk about her miscarriage? If I want women to be free to talk about periods, breastfeeding, childbirth, and other 'women-only' subjects, so we all know we are not alone, then miscarriage must come into that too. She should not have to keep it quiet in order to not offend the sensibilities of delicate men who are reading. Miscarriage is a fact of life, and it is often painful and messy and emotional. And the more women feel able to discuss it, the less isolated and alone other women will feel, whether the miscarriage is, to them, a relief or a profound loss.

The third point is perhaps the most enraging. How dare she feel relief at miscarrying? How dare she be planning an abortion at all? How dare she complain about abortion provision?

I'm not going to use this post to argue about why women deserve ultimate control over their own bodies. But we do. I hope I'm preaching to the converted, but if not, the debate occurs in so many places that it should not be necessary here.

Ms Trunk's situation does, of course, brings up issues of access to abortion. For a woman to have to be relieved to miscarry, because getting an abortion is so fraught with difficulties, is a really appalling situation.

I will not condem Penelope Trunk for sending that message. Not at all. At worst, it was perhaps insensitive, but this is a woman who was miscarrying in the middle of a board meeting. She might have been relieved, but it would nonetheless have been a difficult, awkward and painful situation. Sometimes women need to stop putting everyone else first and express themselves as they need to.

She had every right to feel relieved when she realised what was happening, and she should never made to feel shame at feeling that, nor should she be, or feel, silenced by others who find it distasteful.

Her body was going through something that millions of women experience. Some of those women are devastated, others are ambivalent, and some are glad. Some, like Penelope Trunk herself, miscarry more than once and feel very differently about each instance. And this is all common.

I recommend this post on the subject at DoubleX. She says,
not talking about a miscarriage or an abortion—or all the complicated feelings that can get rolled up in both—because it's just too personal is fine. But not talking about it because no one else ever talks about it—so maybe we're just not supposed too—is not.

We need the freedom to discuss the things we need to discuss, to continue the work of the feminist health collectives of the 70s and truly liberate ourselves.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

One Day,

... all email will be this good.

sf


(Btw, I'm incurablehippie on twitter).