Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - This is perhaps the emptiest time of the year. The noise has died down, the smoke has settled, the sparks have long faded from the skies, the feasts on our tables long raided. There are no more gifts to wrap or open, no more reunions to attend. It’s as if we’ve snapped out of our madness and are now forced to come to grips with the resumption of our sanity. The holiday season is over and all we are left with is one giant hangover.

So let this year’s first installment of Trends of The Week serve as our reminder of what really happened while we were all busy partying. Hopefully, we won’t discover any drunk tweets in the harsh light of day. Actually, you know what? Most tweets sound drunk, anyway. Let’s all clean up and move on.

Numbers Game

The mechanics of this Twitter game are simple: You direct-message someone a number, and that person tweets a description of you, along with the number you gave. The idea is that no one else would know who this person is describing apart from the person being described, which is sort of the social media equivalent of shouting an inside joke inside a room filled with people who have no idea what you’re talking about. Perhaps the intended audience of one feels a specific kind of satisfaction made possible by the combined thrill of anonymity and public avowal. And perhaps the tweeter feels a certain kind of catharsis not yet offered by Twitter in its current form. Subtweeting is fun, only if you actually believe that the person you’re referring to knows who you’re tweeting about. This numbers game, which is essentially authorized subtweeting, is both more and less fun, depending on which side of the secret/confession scale you tend to lean towards. The fact that this trended shows that there is still room for secrets in social media, after all. As long as you get to shout them to the world.

#PeopleWhoMadeMy2013

When the novelty of the numbers game finally wore off, it seemed appropriate that #PeopleWhoMadeMy2013 trended. Here’s an actual shout out that mentions the actual person you’re pertaining to, in all its public glory. It’s an abbreviated throwback to the beginnings of social media, back when all we had was Friendster and its emphasis on other people’s testimonials. It’s a far cry to today’s orgy of self-promotion, but we all agree that social media is much better now and makes everything easier, like forgetting the recent past and how much our psyche has been altered over the last decade.

This hashtag comes but once a year, while similar ones probably trend a few times every month or so. But paying tribute to other people used to take up most of our time in the Internet. It used to be all we ever did. Now it’s been downgraded to a year-end “trend.” Social media has changed, and so have we.

Goodbye 2013

It’s impossible not to sense the bitterness in that trending phrase. We’ve wanted to say goodbye to this year since Yolanda hit more than a month ago. It was the last straw, the one that broke the camel’s proverbial back that was already burdened by natural disasters, political scandals, and a government that has become a regular punch line. We finally got to say goodbye to all that this week because of the arbitrary 365-day designation we use to mark our existence, because the unlucky 13 finally gave way to the more harmless and rounder 14.

But we all know that life is more a running stream than it is a cycle. The baggage doesn’t go away no matter how many pounds of gunpowder we light up. Thieves in the legislative are still not convicted and lives wrecked by typhoon Yolanda remain wrecked. There is no actual fresh start in the real world. The Great Reboot only exists within the grammar of our minds as projected on our Twitter accounts. And as we shifted into another calendar year, another meaningless man-made marker, it looked and felt real. It always does.

Yow

Will this be a thing in 2014? “Yow” randomly trended in New Year’s Eve, almost like an ominous primer for a catchword that might sweep the world this year. Apparently, “yo” has evolved or devolved into “yow” now and a quick Twitter search shows that this is a global thing. The word is now spelled the way it’s pronounced, so that when we say something like “Yow, that’s swag!” we’re actually supposed to tweet it that way, too. This may have been going on for months now, but it may have finally tipped this week. You’ve all been warned, yow!

#Wonderful2014

Every new year feels promising. It’s human instinct to want things to be constantly better. As master of the hashtag @KobeBryant tweeted succinctly on New Year’s Day: “#14>13.”  But there’s something seemingly unique about the optimism for 2014. The remarkable wretchedness of the previous year is almost forcing everyone to will this year into being redemptive. High expectations are usually the prerequisites for disappointment, but in this case, we are only putting non-existent pressure on a non-real entity. It’s not up to 2014, it’s up to us, and the hope is that all our collective positive energy could propel us into a better year. Let’s hope that “14” will truly be greater than “13.” It has to be.

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