On Saturday buy gold wow morning I was preparing a news comedy piece for radio when word broke out about Paris. Convicted sex offender Rolf Harris had just overdosed on candy given to him by strangers and I'd been reading out a slew of highly offensive puns to a fellow broadcaster when our producer came to us to discuss the situation. There was a low hum in the studio as we announced on air we wouldn't be doing our jokes this week, but instead report on the over one hundred people who had just been killed in the exact same place where I once vomited a gut full of moules frites back in 2012.

I drove from the studio through a mood appropriate weather induced haze. At home I hunted through my social media outlets, crazed, hair at Doc levels of elevation from the humidity and all the pulling. I searched for something to connect to, someone to share my outrage, and my sorrow. What I found first, though, was hate. Mentions of Syrian refugee terrorists, closed borders and anti Muslim slurs. The hate felt visceral it panicked me like a child is panicked when she finds out her grandmother is going into hospital. Like she can only anticipate more pain.

Then looming over this giant Pauline Hanson shaped turd came a great tidal wave of hashtags. PrayforParis, PrayforBeirut, PrayforKenya, PrayfortheWorld. I don't pray. I'm a dirty Atheist, in that I'm an Atheist and I have yet to shower today. But watching this wave of prayers, thoughts and small kindnesses drown out the battle cries of bigotry was heartwarming. I sat at my computer screen and I wept, alone but not quite so alone anymore.

Today I had an argument with a friend about meatspace versus cyberspace. Meatspace, or IRL, is a space where we are embodied and can interact with one another in physical and significant ways, like through smooching, hi fives and stimulating coffee conversations about all the cool shit we've seen online.

In between World of Warcraft avatars and too clever twitter handles there exists a valid and important emotional space for me. A space where I can express my thoughts, my sorrow and my sweet collection of Christina Ricci gifs, all while feeling heard.

This is a space where, over the weekend, a twitter hashtag demonstrated an immediate swell of compassion to people who live across the world. Yet it is also the space where we all went out of our way to make each other feel just terrible about using it.

It seems you can't even throw up a picture of a candle online without causing some kind of backlash. The general consensus seems to be that sharing your feelings online doesn't do anything to help, so can we all just go back to sharing our hot takes about Auspol, please.

It would be easy, then, to conclude that cynicism is rife, and online acts of compassion are both inconsequential and somewhat self indulgent. After all, in a world where deaths from terrorist acts have increased an unfathomable 80% since 2014, what the hell is your mum's Facebook photo of a candle going to do?

It's not like some terrorist is going to reconsider their life choices after reading your mum's blurb about how she felt a deep connection with Paris ever since watching Amelie. It's not like a victim's family is going to have their grief cured by a French flag overlay on your mum's Facebook profile pic.

But there is something to be said about the power of masturbatory rituals in times of crisis. I am personally a big fan of masturbation for three reasons, and none of them have to do with helping other people. I do it to feel good, to release something inside of me and to help keep my sanity. The truth is, my masturbatory habits, much like my tweets, aren't really about you.

Unfortunately, though, unlike masturbation, an online public statement of sympathy is often seen as a political act. In cyberspace we seem to interpret feelings as opinion, hashtags as partisan activism, and adorable puppy gifs as "highly inappropriate, Kara".

Oscar Wilde once wrote that "it is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought." Never did these words feel more true than when reading a simple PrayforParis tweet be disparaged immediately by the masses for not praying for Syria, or for propagating religious extremism, or for being indecent and selfish, or for simply not being enough.

It's understandable, though, that we have yet to figure out how to engage with great public outpourings of compassion. If social media were a pimple popping, groin rubbing teen, hashtags would be in kindergarten. They are trying their very best, but it's actually really difficult to colour within these arbitrary lines we keep drawing for them.

And let's be real here, these hashtags aren't some kind of call to arms. We aren't bringing pitchforks to a town square and shouting 'KILL THE BEAST!'. This is mass catharsis. Like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, we speak our grief, our fear, our sympathies and our gifs as one. I may be a dirty Atheist, but in a war torn world, this kind of harmony gives me faith in people, at least.
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