So recently it was #HeteroSexualPrideDay...apparently. See, I only know this because some people were making fun of it on Twitter. And it got me thinking. Looking into the hashtag, I saw some people using it to push their narratives (the "If gays can have it why can we?), there were those genuinely embracing it (using it as a chance to say that they liked that part of themselves), and, more than anything, people making fun of it, mocking it. Now, before we get any farther into this, I want to say that I am not talking about the politics of this particular hashtag or anything about it's social impact. This is solely about hashtags trending in general. We square? Good.
So the people mocking this hashtag were also using it for their tweets, adding it as an eye-roll to ironic statements, or outright tagging a post with it to throw their criticism into the hashtag's pool. And the hashtag in question was indeed trending, which it seemed, caused more people critical of it to post their jokes and critiques into the same hashtag. While there were those using it for it's intended purpose, the main reason the hashtag was trending at all seemed to be because of the exposure that it's detractors were giving it. So the only reason I, an average millennial Internet Person, knew about the tag was because of people who didn't like that it existed in the first place.
This is, I think, one of the greatest irony of the internet's constant Hate Network. The Hate Network is for any and all opinions on politics, video games, sports, fidget spinners, you name it. It's those people who have to use social media to vent about something they don't like and include references, in this case a hashtag, in their tirades to direct their venom at people who they might disagree with. And by doing so, they give those platforms a larger voice and a greater chance to impact others. It makes me think of the recent U.C. Berkeley riots shutting down an event for Milo Yiannopoulos. Instead of taking to maybe a hundred students at the venue, he got on Fox news and talked to millions. Or how #HeteroSexualPrideDay is trending and exposed to innumerable twitter users because people wanted to draw negative attention to it.
The problem seems to be that we can't just let something wither and die. We see a Twitter hashtag we don't like, we can't ignore it. We have to jump into that section of Twitter and try and prove how much more clever or well-informed we are than everyone else. We have to point out how wrong they are. Or on Facebook, when something political happens that you don't agree with, it becomes your duty to write an essay to your friends and family, who either already agree with you or you won't change their minds anyway, about why the choices and outcomes were wrong and how they should do it better. Hell, even this article, while maybe a bit of a step back, is a discussion of recent trend.
We can't let well enough alone and let things with no real momentum reach their destined, uneventful end. Instead, we have to engage, throw ourselves into our social media, and tweet ironically about something we don't even really care about. And the cycle continues with each passing meme.
#Inevitable
