Terra Carmichael, a California mother of three, is part of growing trend: new moms “tweeting” their way through labor, sending out word of every painful contraction.
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/08/14/costello.wired.art.jpg caption="Terra Carmichael says tweeting helped her morale during childbirth."]
“My husband was laughing at me because I was saying, ‘Gimme my iPhone, I gotta check my Facebook status,” she says. “He actually thought it was very funny I was doing this and was actually giving me ideas of things to tweet.”
Carmichael, who sells baby products on “FlyingPeas.com,” wasn't just tweeting to loved ones, but to hundreds of people who paid rapt attention to tweets like: "On my way to the hospital. If they even try to send me back home I just may punch them in the throat,” and “6 cm but with complications. C section-bound.”
She isn't the only woman who's sharing the birth process. But have we crossed the line? Are we too wired?
“Well, there was a very famous Supreme Court decision that says, ‘I know it when I see it,’ about pornography,” says John Abell, New York Bureau Chief for “Wired.com.” “I think we will, collectively, rise up and say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Abell says that hasn't happened yet, at least not online. But some mental health professionals see it differently – saying some things, like childbirth, ought to be sacred. Clinical psychologist Jeff Gardere, who uses Facebook and Twitter, argues we share way too much online.
Facebook, he says, can become a "marriage buster,” because couples share personal information with "virtual friends,” instead of each other. “The Internet, if you will, becomes an escape hatch where they don't have to be intimate with one another, it's easier to be in some ways intimate with the world, but it's not a real intimacy, it's very superficial.”
But, Carmichael disagrees, saying she didn't share the most intimate details of childbirth via tweet – only the superficial. Tweeting helped her morale during labor. “People are writing and saying keep going, you're doing a great job. It's kind of like I had a personal cheerleading squad – a virtual cheerleading squad of my followers.
What do you think? Are we too wired? Tell us your thoughts.