The transition from the almost in-person storytelling feel that the tweets from Aziah envoke and the more mainstream article from Rolling Stone demonstrates both two different ways social media can be used, as well as the all-too-common commodification of a Black person’s story.
The tweets from Aziah come across as personable, as if she was telling the story to a friend in person, punctuated with emoji’s, capitalization, and Twitter grammar, which allows the tweets to flow into one another. On the other hand, the Rolling Stone article, as described by Veronica Wells from Madame Noire, views Aziah’s story as a commodity to be written on, expanded upon, and eventually sold. It takes an everyday individual and their story and turns it into an “easier” read, with ads and a large company inserting themselves into the story and lives of people they knew nothing of prior to the Tweets going viral. Between Rolling Stone, James Franco directing the movie, and the white writers, it seems to mirror the preying on of vulnerable or unaware people by the pimps described in Aziah’s story, commodifying her experience simply due to its ability to peak interest in readers, just as she herself saw firsthand the commodification of women in the sex-trade industry.
Commodification is certainly at work here. But I think there’s also a larger question of the kinds of narrative that the Twitter medium might enable, that may have been (in fact were and still are) systematically sidelined by more accepted media.