2 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2021
    1. Twitter threads gave illness a name and a face, grounding the dread in particular bodies and disparate — if often overlapping — experiences. They placed these experiences in history, creating an archive of disease, fear, rage, and hope that will persist even as these feelings — and some of these people — have passed.

      Archives are only worth their weight in water if interested parties can find what they're looking for. When artifacts aren't gathered and curated into public-facing unities or collections, then history elides them until further notice. These threads are still floating in the sprawl of the Twitterverse, placed into history and drowned out by an ocean of pure, frantic noise. What this piece makes evident to me is the need for restoration: that they need to be resurfaced, preserved, made visible again.

    2. A new genre of writing emerged in early 2020: the Covid-19 symptoms thread.