Miscarriage at work?!

I went to check my email today on AOL (yes, I still have an AOL account from 3rd grade that I use), and there are always little "news" stories about interesting stories that happened today. Generally, they are not groundbreaking, but I usually read them because they are at the very lest entertaining. Just a few minutes ago, the headline article on aol.com was about a woman who Twittered her miscarriage in a board meeting. I obviously speak from a male perspective, but regardless on ones views on abortion and babies, most will agree that women generally take the issue of miscarriage pretty seriously, especially when it's happening to them. For this woman, it was almost a relief that she was losing her child. She Twittered, "I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a f***-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin". Granted, religious groups were all over this and it gave a bad rep for pro-choice groups, but it still had relatively little impact on the overall happenings of September 30th, 2009.

We have been talking a lot about commodity fetishism lately in class, but we generally refer to tangible objects and products, but are our personal lives themselves becoming commodities? It's easy to forget where a Nike shoe came from and what went into producing it, but I'm afraid that it's becoming ever more easy to forget about someone's feelings and create a sensational Twitter post out of it. From politicians to Oprah to the average person, the idea that we can send out a message as a small piece of digital information for the world to share only contributes to its diminishing meaning. A diamond is only special because there are few of them. What will it take for our endless Twitters and facebook status updates to mean absolutely nothing to the rest of the world?