@laydeejol

I feel sad today because someone that I barely knew - had never even met - died suddenly.  @laydeejol was one of the first people I followed on Twitter when I moved to Hong Kong and she was the first to follow back and reply to one of my tweets; her tweets were usually funny, irreverent and I liked what I knew if her through Twitter.  @laydeejol - whose real name was Jolean Wong - died yesterday in a swimming accident.

Social media does things to us; it brings closer in a way I'm not sure that we've ever experienced before. People that we don't know - who we'll never meet - can become important to us in ways that we might not expect. They may just be avatars and images on our phone but we know, deep down, that there is a real person behind each of those characters.  We can connect to so many more people and, through those connections, we can experience so much more of life.  But, of course, in doing so we expose ourself to so many more accidents and unfortunate events and, in cases like this, sudden and pointless death.

My heart goes out to those who knew Jolean in real life, to her friends and family. You'll never meet us, the 255 of us who followed her on Twitter; it doesn't compare but we share your grief in our own way.