There’s a trend sweeping our generation, as part of the ever greater Globfrag we confront daily. It is a throwback to the earliest days of the World Wide Web, when chain letters ran amok and users felt the need to kitsch up the new world. Oh, 1995.
I write, of course, of the 25 Things Phenomena.
The craze seemingly came out of nowhere, and represents our generation’s spontaneous movement for … inane, random, facts. Way to enlighten the world, Oughtobots (©).
Coined.
What does it mean that we feel it necessary to share 25 facts with 25 self-selected people in our lives? Are we that truly incapable of communicating about ourselves to each other that only through social networking websites can we dispense the eternal and not-so eternal truths of our lives?
I, like many others, initially scoffed at the idea. But it was only a matter of days – hours, really – until I was working away at the Java House (productivity!), in an attempt to hammer out 25 appropriate and little-known facts about myself.
I forgot to mention that I never learned to ride a bike.
Perhaps not that surprising, the movement has spawned a huge amount of press attention. Media organizations are always trying to figure out “What young people are up to”, and this fashion has drawn great notice. I mean, the Times has wrote on this, people. It’s real.
Read what the Dallas Morning News has to say:
Experts call this kind of phenomenon a “meme,” a kind of social infection that affects the way people think or act. Like biological bugs, memes are unpredictable.
That’s so freaking cute.
And now, to complete the meta-cycle, reporting about the reporting!
I don’t even know what to say at this point. Cheers, Journalism?
I’m not too sure about these 25 things lists. Or Facebook in general (don’t get me wrong- I’m on it too, of course). To quote the Globe & Mail:
“Well, if you buy the hype about the social Web, you might expect a lot more. The mythology that surrounds it suggests that it’s brought out a new, oversharing strain of human, one that’s given to parading around unself-conscious and uninhibited. To read the news, you’d think the Web was a psychic garden of Eden, in which people suddenly forgot the need for fig leaves.”
These 25 things lists seem to be picking up the slack. Perhaps it’s that we’re bored with our middleness and need to convince people that we’re far more interesting than we really are…
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