This morning the UK-Twitterverse was asking for tweets praising our contact with/experience of the NHS and hash them under the title #WeLoveTheNHS. So, I tweeted thusly:
I had a heart attack & got angioplasty & a stent within an hour. I’m originally from US but the NHS is (a good reason) I stay in (the) UK #welovethe NHS
(Note: This happened in 2006, 3-1/2 years ago).
Now, my Facebook page picks up all my tweets. From a friend (a real meat-life friend, not just an Internet friend), I got this Facebook response:
You just shocked me, Chris H! I thought you’d had a heart attack *today* (and a miraculous recovery and reappearance on the internets).
A bit later another friend (real meat-life friend again) said that he thought the same thing.
This is a case of “context-slip”, in that the context I originally tweeted to did not exist in Facebook, where the tweet was replicated.
What to do? As a soc.motsseur always says, “Context, context, context”. However, there is no good way to provide the context here.
Has anyone else had this problem with messages to one social network replicated without context on another?
Enquiring minds want to know!
I don’t use twitter but in this particular case, putting a date on what you wrote (“I had a heart attack in 2006”) might make it clearer without adding a lot of additional words.
True, so part of the context-slip is my not realising that not everyone was aware that the heart attack happened in 2006 (not 2009) and my readers not realising that #welovethenhs was an opportunity for people to recount their good experiences with the NHS for the US audience.