Susan Orlean, the Aspen bear and the Twitter

New Yorker writer and celebrated author of the Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean, tweeted that her house in Aspen was invaded by a bear. The Rocky Mountain bruin reportedly got into her fridge and ate things, including takeout. True incredible story! So why are the tweets so… banal?

To be fair, maybe it’s not Orlean’s fault. Life details conveyed in 140 characters, even when concerning celebrities and bears, and even when conveyed by celebrity writers, can just sound commonplace. As we all have come to learn, Twitter is about joining a larger story.

See if you don’t agree that the part of this thread that gets interesting is when Orlean mentions a similar attack on the neighbor’s house. So now we need the tweets from the neighbor, who is also probably a celebrity twitterer. Has anyone been following a celebrity who has been posting banal tweets about a bear attacking their Aspen getaway? We have to crowd-source this thing in order to make it a story! Otherwise, what news site would post anything at all about it? Whoops.

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Hat-tip to Gawker, of course.

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