Mark O'Connell on how Twitter reveals the ways in which public events can focus our collective minds.
Most days, part of the complex compulsion of Twitter is the fragmentariness of the experience, the way in which, barring some terrible or hilarious or infuriating event, everyone tends to be talking about something different. You scroll through your timeline and you get a witticism, then an entreaty to read an essay or column, then a grandstanding denunciation of some phone company’s subpar customer service, then an announcement of what a specific person’s current jam is, then an accidental insight into some inscrutable private misery. Its multifariousness and thematic disorder is a major element of its appeal. But with the death of someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Lou Reed or Seamus Heaney—someone who has left an impression on many, many people—there is a quick and radical convergence of focus.