A Word in your Ear

Tonight’s word is ‘trending’

‘Trend’ is another of those nouns corporate America has turned into a verb – to diarize, to window your diary, to monetize and so forth. ‘Trending’ I think began on Twitter and refers to people and events getting high tweets and attention. In this sense, it is self-fulfilling – the more tweep bodies you have to trend something, the more it will trend.

This delivers two insights to you and I not involved in such bollocks: first, that given time, extreme Mammon will pervert everything; and second, the mismatch between what Sofa Dwellers (and those with even the most basic ability to think) find important is depressing – as in, it’s like the emptiness between two galaxies.

Thus, while #LoveratAndy is trending on UK Twitter, the chances are that in the real world beyond media ‘content’, NATO has arrived in the suburbs of Moscow just before the Autumn sets in.

Turning down the surreal control a bit (but not much) as I write these are the UK tweetrends:

Paramour will mean nothing to anyone, seven are sport (six of which are soccer) one is about Ninjas that even I think of as extinct turtles, and one is about a day to celebrate the making of ‘friends’ on the internet. What will Hallmark think of next – #BitterCampusKillerDay?

In the rest of the online media meanwhile, the big stories are:

Erdogan killing every Kurd he can find, Erdogan blackmailing EU, Hungary & Poland pledge to tell Euronauts to go f**k themselves, Temperatures set to plunge to -15°C, and Robots will take over most jobs within 30 years.

A lot of this is just more evidence of the unerringly bland globalist media/marketing twatter designed to reduced everything to One Size Fits All. But one man’s meat, as the saying goes, is another man’s poison: and my trending is not your trending.

These, for example, are my trending concerns tonight:

The Trésor Public says I haven’t paid my tax, but I have; all three roof Veluxes leak; the large Ash tree to the West of the converted barn is creaking disturbingly; I’ve received another bill from the vultures who run the Blackwall Tunnel; United lost 2-1 at bloody Sunderland for crying out loud; my memory is getting worse; a congenital lying idiot is the Prime Minister of my Homeland; a heartless ice-bucket and a business fraudster are in charge, respectively, of the UK’s Welfare and NHS systems; US, British and NATO troops may soon be head-to-head with Russian soldiers in the Eastern EU; I have peripheral neuropathy in my feet; and the fridge has started to mutter venomously.

Perhaps a latter-day Bob Dylan might have written ‘You can be in my trend if I can be in yours’, but life isn’t like that: as the much-missed Graham Chapman said in Life of Brian, “We are all individuals”….and the adoring crowd shouted the same thing back in Orwellian unison.

Ultimately, the greatest judge of any form of trending is surely Time. This is what was trending on Twitter in 2009:

Let’s face it, (a) Swine flu x 2, UK snow, Earth Hour, AIG and Obama’s inauguration have not turned out to be enduring; and (b) Iran x 2 + Tehran, and Gaza haven’t changed much for the better. So the overall conclusion has to be that Twitter’s trending list is a sort of barometer of the ephemeral and the insoluble. There is zero evidence in there that trending fulfils any purpose beyond giving the least intelligent chatterati a soundbite with which to venture forth at Abiligail’s Party.

The only way to use Twitter to advantage is to follow those who say something interesting and/or funny, and then cull those whose amusing insights turn out to have been beginner’s luck. That way, one winds up with at least the chance to gauge the importance of trending…but through the medium of tweeps who have a consistent track record of suggesting something pro or con the trends.

Around 2000 years ago, the big trend in Nazareth was the local King’s programme of Firstborn Slaying. I doubt very much if #babygenocide would’ve been much of a guide to the future.

Filed under: A Word in Your Ear, Uncategorized Tagged: Trending, Twitterbollocks