Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - This was a specially remarkable week on Twitter — not because of the things that ended up trending, but because of one non-trending story that is literally of more cosmic importance than all of this week’s trends combined. Scientists working from a telescope stationed in South Pole have discovered what theoretical physicists call “gravitational waves,” those little creases in space-time that Albert Einstein posited in his General Theory of Relativity published 98 years ago. These thingamajigs are supposedly aftershocks of the Big Bang — that cosmic explosion that gave birth to the universe, causing space-time to expand. This has been purely theoretical for a century. Now we finally have physical evidence that the universe really did start from some random explosion and not from some carefully laid-out grand design.

But this did not trend. It did not cause the slightest ripple in social media’s universe. What did trend were things like #MasarapMahalin, #TipsParaHindiMasaktan, #SaTuwing, #YungClassmateMong, and other hashtags whose randomness traces its origin from the moment of the Big Bang. Randomness has always been the constant law of our physical reality. Profundity is a mere product of consciousness. Never expect any of that from Twitter.

Social media goes emo with #TipsParaHindiMasaktan

The phrase “Wag Umasa” trended along with #TipsParaHindiMasaktan, which suggests that killing all expectations is widely considered to be the best recourse for the pain-averse. So in one bold random stroke, Twitter suddenly went Buddhist on us, recommending an ascetic worldview to the instant gratification generation. But something tells me that “Wag Umasa” wasn’t so much an earnest piece of advice as it was a commentary on the inevitability of pain. Not getting hurt is as impossible as not wanting, social media — the largest enabler of feelings in the 21st century — reminds us. Twitter is nothing if not an ongoing rhetorical question.

#PagAko opens a gateway to a new sociological insight (I think)

The “#PagAko” hashtag sounds limitless in its open-endedness. The implicit ellipses opens up an infinite set of possibilities for wishful thinking — from becoming a millionaire to marrying your soulmate. But for whatever reason, “Tumangkad” was the word most commonly attached to the hashtag, as evidenced by its sudden appearance on the trends list. Filipinos aren’t exactly known for their height, but who would’ve thought that this would be the single biggest obsession in a highly dysfunctional country that has an average monthly salary of US$279 and a laundry list of other, graver Third World problems? Why haven’t social surveys caught wind of this? Why haven’t height fantasies replaced sex as the go-to subliminal bait in advertising? Why hasn’t a single politician run on a platform of height-increase nutrition?

Clearly, we, as a society, have been overlooking people’s height issues for the longest time. Thank you, Twitter, for bringing this to our attention, even if no one has the slightest idea how to address it.

An inordinate amount of people fall for #NaniwalaKaNaman

On a related note, #NaniwalaKaNaman trended a few days after #TipsParaHindiMasaktan did, as if social media was going through a collective heartbreak this week that it just couldn’t get over, perpetually vacillating between depression and acceptance like a drunken teenager. But then again, Twitter does feel like a drunken teenager’s room: full of clumsy, awkward showiness and loud, overwrought feelings. It needs to go out of the house and immerse in a new hobby or something.

#selfie is still a thing

A week after Time magazine declared the Philippines as the selfie capital of the world, Pinoy social media belatedly responded by taking it to another level. Not only did the word trend, it also trended conspicuously as a hashtag, which means that people willingly wanted it to trend. Pinoys are now being overly conscious about being overly conscious because Time magazine featured that very consciousness.

We have now gone past pure narcissism — this is narcissism as a form of celebration, an expression of Pinoy Pride, a full embrace of a distinction that everyone — especially the local media that covered the Time feature — seems to be unironically proud of. As normative as selfies have become, there’s still a considerably loud stigma attached to it. The country’s new title as the selfie capital of the world has not obliterated the vocal minority who still greet every selfie with a sneer, but it sure has been blanketed by the voice and hashtags of the gleeful majority.

Courtney Love joins in search for MH370, gets mocked by Twitter

The former Hole frontwoman and wife of deceased rock icon Kurt Cobain became social media’s favorite punchline this week when she claimed to have seen the missing Malaysian Airlines plane in a picture of the ocean she shared on Facebook after joining in the crowd-sourcing search on Tomnod.com. Authorities have checked — the plane isn’t in there. “I’m no expert,” Love was quick to note, shocking absolutely no one.

At this point — a good two weeks after Flight MH370 disappeared — no one is an expert anymore. Twitter made fun of Love (and predictably made a meme parade out of it) because she’s been a nutjob for most of her life and because the randomness of the whole thing was a jarring tangent on a story that had otherwise taken a baffling, frustrating, and depressing straight line. But two weeks worth of press conferences and expert talking heads giving their “take” on all the news networks have not brought us any closer to the truth. In the search for MH370, we are all Courtney Love. Somehow that doesn’t sound funny at all.