At the Thursday morning funeral of Sopranos star James Gandolfini, Hilaria Baldwin’s tweets were going out to her followers. Although sources close to Hilaria insist that she was merely retweeting things that had been tweeted during the service and was not actively tweeting inside the church, British paparazzi George Stark reported from the UK’s Daily Mail that Baldwin’s wife had been tweeting.
Alec Baldwin himself went on a massive tweeting spree angrily insisting that his pregnant wife was only tweeting after the funeral. He started his tweet with “My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this…trash.” He defended his wife then by tweeting, “my wife DID NOT use her phone, in any capacity, at our friend’s funeral.” He went on to say, “how much of this…are people supposed to take? These…blatant lies EVERY DAY.”
To understand this situation fully, one would have to immerse in the social media sphere fully. At a wedding, funeral, or bar mitzvah, one can completely expect social media connectivity, status updates and tweeting. That is the new experience for our society, to stay connected during all of our pivotal and personal/too personal moments. As we increase in our diminution of privacy in the public spheres, with Google Earth, phone tapping surveillance and recordings omnipresent in the visual and audial air waves, we also become more transparent on a personal level, sending status updates and tweets during live births, or while having sex. Charlie Sheen reports tweeting while having sex and is addicted to twitter. But he is not the only person. Several mothers giving birth tweeted the entire process. Our society is increasingly becoming more and more connected to a hive collective and as the pace of our interactions becomes faster, and as technology itself drives down the barriers between our thoughts and our comments, we have become an obsessive-compulsive attention deficit disordered culture. That is one of the results of the hyperconnectivity that defines today’s interactions between people.
Alec Baldwin’s wife is 29 years old. She isn’t sage and 55 like him, who probably has gone to many respectful, haunting and somber funerals in his time over the years. Hilaria is a few generations away from that, and tweeting at a funeral, although disrespectful by any standard, probably is happening all over the country for people in that age group, because grief is no reason to disconnect. Sharing your grief is probably a more positive response to grief on the whole. On the other hand, Hilaria wasn’t sharing her grief, if she tweeted at all. She seemed instead, as her tweets show, completely disinterested with the funeral, as she discussed Rachel Ray and anniversary gifts. Also from the nature of her tweets, she seemed self-obsessed, as she tweeted about her own talk show performance. In any case, her tweets showed her boredom and that she truly didn’t give a hoot about James Gandolfini. Being that she is 30 years younger than her husband’s friend circle, I think she should be given a break. It’s probably true that she was tweeting at the funeral, no matter what silver fox Alec Baldwin said to the contrary.