I spend a lot of time on the Internet. And as I am a millennial who is Internet-savvy, I’m a prime candidate for online trends. I can’t really think of one trend that I have enjoyed or cared about, and that is for one reason only: Internet trends are stupid. I don’t actively hate them, but I am really confused about why they catch on. Sometimes I think that I could create something that goes viral, but then something like Gangnam Style explodes and I’m back to realizing that I have no clue what will become popular. In that way, I am like an elderly lady. Here are some Internet trends that just baffle me. If someone can write in to explain why they liked or participated in any of these, please feel free.
Harlem Shake
I was never really into Gangnam Style, but I can at least see why people would be: it’s a silly, catchy song with some stupidly fun dance moves. Now, the Harlem Shake was truly inexplicable. As far as I can tell, this is the Harlem Shake: a group of people is standing around, one starts dancing, and then the rest join in. I don’t know why it’s funny and I don’t know why it’s interesting. My friend sent me a puppy Harlem Shake video and I love puppies and I still didn’t care. At the time Harlem Shake was big, I was interning at Huffington Post. I covered a Big Brother Canada taping and at one of the breaks they had us do the Harlem Shake. No one in the audience wanted to do it, but that didn’t matter. One kid volunteered to self-consciously start dancing, and then the rest of us half-heartedly joined in. I remember swaying a few times before giving up and focusing on not dying of humiliation.
Bitstrips
These were the cartoons that your Facebook friends constantly posted with them doing mundane things with a mundane caption explaining what was going on in the picture. As far as I can tell, they were originally used as an educational tool but were soon co-opted by people who were obsessed with seeing themselves in cartoon form. The strips weren’t funny or quirky. It was just cartoons of people doing mundane things like eating or petting a cat. I have no explanation for why they caught on, except for narcissism, which explains many of the things on this list.
YouTube “pranks”
This may just be generalizing, but I don’t think I’m too off base in saying that most YouTube prank videos are done by teenagers who haven’t figured out how to be funny yet. I’m sure there are some funny ones, but lots of the popular prank trends just involve people being cruel or inexplicable and then laughing at it. For example, cone-ing involves the prankster going through the drive-thru, ordering an ice cream cone, and then grabbing it by the ice cream instead of the cone. All that accomplished is confusing the drive-thru worker and now you have to wash your hands. Good job. A crueler, but still inexplicable prank involves the prankster going through the drive-thru, ordering a drink, and then throwing it at the fast food worker. Congratulations, you managed to hurt a minimum wage worker. I don’t get why they’re funny, and I don’t get why those two pranks caught on.
YouTube challenges
Some YouTube challenges at least have a positive outcome, like the ice bucket challenge. Some are just stupid, like the fire challenge, which involves dousing yourself in something flammable and setting yourself on fire. I don’t know what people hope to get out of setting themselves on fire. There’s the ice water challenge, where you dunk yourself in icy water (one teenager died by swimming in a lake in the middle of winter by himself). There’s the cinnamon challenge, which is to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon. This causes choking, vomiting, and in some cases, more long-term negative effects, like collapsed lungs or pulmonary scarring. That sounds fun. Look, I get doing dangerous or painful things because you think it’s funny: I used to ride my goats until I got bucked off and my brother and his friends used to play with fire in the woods. But neither of those are things that were 100 per cent certain to lead to extreme discomfort.
I’m not totally convinced that the people who do these things actually think they’re funny. I think a lot of it is about wanting to be validated by likes on Facebook or YouTube views, and they see this as an easy way to get that. Why this desire is so strong that it overrides any self-preservation instincts, I’m not sure. I also know that these things aren’t going away, and I’ll just be annoyed by the next big trend.
