WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS
How a comment-driven culture works
By: Josh Cruz
The internet runs on trending topics. It’s very easy to get swept up into the hysteria of whatever the latest “thing” is. It is much more interesting, however, to look at the pattern of trends in hindsight. What is the life cycle of an event?
We’ll start by defining what I mean by ‘event.’ The 2016 election was an ‘event,’ but it would be wrong to put it next to ‘the consumption of tide pods.’ There is certainly an ineffable quality to this category of topics; they have to be simultaneously absurd enough to be interesting but not serious enough to be consequential. The best way to check if a story fits this mold is the “what?-huh.” test. What is the what-huh test? I’ll give you an example.
“People are eating Tide Pods.”
“What?”
“People are eating Tide Pods.”
“Huh.”
It’s a simple test – but it filters out a lot of actually important events. Category 5 Hurricanes do not pass the what-huh test. Correspondingly, this article isn’t about important events – it is about what-huh events. These are inherently unimportant, as represented by their internet shelf life. About 75% of searches for ‘Consumption of tide pods’ occurred within a period of 10 days, and that is an outlier example. Many of these events only last for 7 days or less. This makes them difficult to talk about, as they are all so forgettable, but they certainly seemed like they were important online, at some point.
When a what-huh worthy event happens, immediately, there is an initial strike. After social media informs everyone in the world of an event, people go to search about it online. Then it floods social media: Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc. There’s a feedback loop at play here: the more people know, the more people share, the more people learn about it, and the more people know. This is the typical function of gossip in any society, but in our internet enabled world, a piece of information like this can proliferate throughout the world in less than a day.
News organizations thrive on something like this. The first organization to report on an event, or the organization to report with the most interesting headline, will attach themselves to the event’s own popularity. Similar to how stories are thrown around social media, news aggregates like Yahoo! News are designed to promote popular news articles, forming another positive feedback loop, which links back to the main event. Do a Google search for any of the topics mentioned in this article, and go to the “news” section. Most of them are tangentially related and from the last few weeks, there’s usually one or two articles that still remain from the time of the event. That means the article was so popular that Google’s data determined it transcends the time criteria for the news tab. News corporations get to run ads on the articles that everyone glances over, giving them the incentive to churn out the quickest and most base-level descriptions of the events, hoping to be immortalized in medium-term history.
After the main event, a series of sub-events are bound to occur. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he fired a large swath of its staff, hired some of them back, and removed official verification resulting in several lawsuits. This main story was followed up by a series of sub-stories, each of which have their own articles and responses, as is necessary. Follow up events boost the public’s interest in a main story but never seem to outlast the events they spawn from. Elon Musk is still making a ruckus over at Twitter – but the interest has waned.
Beyond just communicating the events themselves, social media has given us the ability to see other famous people’s reactions to events. Less significant than the event themselves, these sub-events give the internet a chance to tap back into the central topic. They also act as a chance for people who weren’t present during the original event to leverage the world’s interest for their own personal gain. For instance, Jim Carey’s public condemnation of Will Smith after the 2022 academy awards resulted in his 3rd largest search boost of the past 5 years. That might not seem like a big deal, but it’s much more significant considering the other spikes on the graph were caused by the release of entire movies.
Beyond famous people commenting on large events because they’re famous, others on the internet comment on the event because it’s ‘the thing’ to talk about. People will bend over backwards to get in on topics before they’re gone. Sure, online educational creator Matt Parker choosing to make a video about the odds of Dream’s speed running is technically harmless. However, the culture of comments doesn’t end there – for instance, Jason Kenney, first minister of Alberta, Canada tweeted this:
On the internet, as in the real world, there are many filters preventing any given person from getting the attention they deserve and/or affecting public consciousness. To reach the top of the boards, any given person needs to have enough money to afford the means to reach the internet. They might need to change their appearance, or ensure their presentation is professional. News presented in smaller bite-sized pieces is almost certainly going to be seen by more people than longer reports, regardless of the accuracy of either work. However, beyond all of this, there is an all-consuming, ever-changing filter: the filter of ‘the thing’. The internet runs on things–people, ideas, controversies, relationships, songs, movies, technology. Whatever ‘the thing’ is at the moment drives what people will click on, and as such, it drives what messages get out there, and what messages fall into the digital ether.
As the internet becomes a larger part of everyone’s lives, and comment culture grows, where does this end? At what point does the filter of ‘the thing’ prevent the vast majority of actually important conversations from happening? What do we do then–when the only way for politicians to get their message across is to appeal to some trendy topic? When filmmakers who want to create works of art are forced to turn their film into some kind of controversy in order to get it seen anywhere? When the best way to raise money for ALS research is to get celebrities to pour ice water on their heads?
At the end of an event’s life cycle is a fade out. No, Chris Rock will not escape the slap–but the slap has certainly escaped everyone else. Trends, despite their name, do not trend; instead, they spike, and fall off. The speed at which the internet forgets about these events is representative of just how insignificant they are. By building this comment culture, we build the new home of public discussion on an empty foundation. The only way to avoid an eventual cultural collapse is to expand the global attention span. By changing the filters we put over internet discourse, we can promote the best voices to the top, instead of the most trendy one.
In terms of public opinion, there’s certainly been a shift in the way we view social media, with Apple and Google supplying their customers with ways to limit their screen time. For you, the reader, I will tell you that the only way to get high quality output from the machine is to put in high quality input. Algorithms will only show you more high quality videos if you show them you aren’t interested in quick, useless ones. So, if you can, avoid watching videos that feel like they’re vying for your attention. Find interesting voices and share them with your friends. We’ve inadvertently wandered into a forest of nonsense, but if you control what you view online, you’ll hopefully find a way out.