Drifting along with an internet tumbleweed

All my life, I’ve been a visual person. So after a marathon of days when temperatures have blown past 90 degrees without tipping their hat, I’ve looked for images to post online that demonstrate how miserably hot it is.

Heat shimmers and wilted grass are low- hanging metaphorical fruit and hardly worth the picking. When a tumbleweed crossed my path in a parking lot last week, however, I knew I’d found my huckleberry.

The fist-size knot of green and beige stalks probably wasn’t an actual tumbleweed, but it looked the part, which made it emblematic of deserts and boiling mercury — an ideal visual metaphor.

I posted a six- second video of the cartwheeling ball of vegetation to Twitter saying, “Now you really know it’s hot outside.” Within minutes, it had been seen more than 1,000 times, and more than 50 users interacted with it via retweets, likes, etc.

That was a real social-media coup, but it also highlighted how sad and confusing the process of sharing content online can be.

In the hours leading up to that post, I’d desperately been trying to increase readership of a story I’d worked on about Operation Song, a therapy program pairing veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress with professional songwriters to transform their painful memories into music.

The story flew under the radar on publication, but it was, I thought, an interesting and worthy topic. After hours of swimming around my social- media pool, however, the Operat i on Song t wee t had been seen by f ewer t han 100 people, only one of whom interacted with it. Now, I’m a child of the internet generation, so I’m fully cognizant of the incomprehensibility of users’ whims. I know there’s no such thing as a magic bullet to getting noticed.

The sad truth is that, all too often, legitimate news — the kind that gives people new perspectives, challenges old ones and broadens worldviews — gets buried in an avalanche of cat videos, hate mongering and, apparent- ly, videos of tumbleweeds. The internet has become, or maybe always has been, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” meets “Hardball.”

Then again, we all live on the internet these days, and attempting to communicate without it would be an idiotic, pointless gesture. Why argue with a truism?

So I’ll continue to tweet fluff and real news in equal measure because it’s what the internet wants and what I know it needs.

Besides, to quote Roy Rogers & The Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”: “I know when night has gone / That a new world’s born at dawn.” Every day offers a fresh chance to strike a chord.

Casey Phillips