Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - Social media kick-started the month of April with much foolishness, albeit not the kind that would’ve been ideal. In an age when Internet hoaxes are still taken seriously, you’d think April Fools’ Day would be a field day for pranksters and fabricators of flesh-eating diseases. Maybe it’s the day’s self-awareness that turned these people off because we had just went through a pretty tame April Fools’ Day.

The UK press, which looks forward to this day as if it were Christmas for journalists, had a great time making false headlines (The Telegraph announced that prominent advocate of Scottish independence, Alex Salmond, had replaced the English Queen on the face of the Scottish pound coin). Google turned Google Maps into a game app for a day with its Pokemon Challenge — a sort of “Where’s Wally” that covers the entire globe, which sounded more like a fun surprise than a confusing hoax. A few Twitter follow-back — uh, “enthusiasts” — from the US thought it would be a great idea to use Will Smith as their avatar and Twitter name as a means to gain more followers and creep people out.

As for Pinoy Internet, apart from a few individual attempts at social media trickery that spanned from the cruel (“I love you”) to the awkward (“I’m gay”), nothing much really happened. Are our media organizations just too scared of online libel? Are we incapable of pulling pranks that aren’t a result of journalistic incompetence? Or is our daily existence already one long joke that renders April Fools’ Day redundant? As the week in Twitter demonstrates, the world has plenty of comedy — intentional or otherwise — to offer us all.

Binibining Pilipinas transmutes into pageantry of snark and lame jokes

I didn’t watch the Binibining Pilipinas pageant this past Sunday, but thanks to those people who live-tweeted the event, I may as well have. Twitter lit up with equal parts snark and glee, especially when it came to the question-and-answer portion. Candidate number 11 said that Amsterdam is the city that best describes her, but disappointingly failed to follow up her answer with “…because I’m all for the legalization of marijuana and prostitution.” Candidate number 16 said, “As a Filipino, I am proud to be a Filipino,” which was nice of her to clear up. Crowd favorite Pia Wurtzbach, who was born in Germany and grew up in the Philippines before moving to England, was asked a question in Filipino by Senator Sonny Angara, who was attacked with pitchforks and torches on Twitter after Wurtzbach failed to win. And three different candidates answered “confidence” to three different questions, which makes you think that they’re all nervous as hell. “We’re standing in front of people,” eventual Binibining Pilipinas winner Mary Jean Lastimosa said. “We don’t know if you’re going to cheer for us, or if you’re going to boo us. We keep our feelings to ourselves and keep our composure.” It’s almost as if she was talking about Twitter.

The Q&A was such a huge event in and of itself, that #RejectedBbPilipinasQuestions became the top trend the following day. It looked promising, reminiscent of David Letterman’s Late Show Top Ten shtick, until you read the tweets that ended up being more like amateur night at Klownz. I’m really disappointed in you, comedy Twitter. Seriously, “Do you wanna build a snowman?” and “What’s the country’s number 2 shampoo?” are all that you’ve got? Boooo…

‘Meteor Garden’ returns to TV, fulfills its Twitter destiny

Throwback Thursday came a few days early this week as the early-aughts Taiwanese TV smash made its return on Monday. The trending hashtag #MeteorGardenUltimateFlashback was a bit of an overstatement, though. Ultimate? Really? Did Meteor Garden coincide with the Big Bang? Did it at least ooze out from the primordial soup? Did the shrieking sounds of F4 fans create time and space in 2003?

People aren’t overreacting on Twitter because their favorite show is back and they miss it — most of them probably owned the DVDs or regularly watch it on YouTube. They’re overreacting because they can finally take their throwback fandom to social media. We now live in an alternate universe where Twitter already existed in 2003: we don’t have to imagine what it would’ve looked like because we can clearly see “#BigyanNgRedCardYan,” “Shan Cai,” “Dao Ming Zi,” “Vaness Wu” and “F4” on the trends list in 2014. Meteor Garden may not have created space-time, but they sure as hell warped it.

Twitter offers prayers for the suffering

Within minutes of the earthquake, #PrayForChile already found its way to the trends list. In less than two hours, it was the top-trending topic worldwide. Awareness spreads so fast from the epicenter these days that any local tragedy can become a global curiosity with enough exponentially multiplied tweets. The tragedy can be so local, in fact, that it may only concern one individual — say, Miley Cyrus, whose pet dog Floyd just died — and the world would still send its condolences at hyper-speed. Soon enough, #RIPFloyd bumps #PrayForChile off the top of the trends list and an entire nation’s fate stands alongside a grieving pet owner in the world’s collective consciousness. In the high-speed vastness of Twitter, the world’s honesty looks exponentially awkward.