Now that 2-Gangnam-12 is a distant memory, it’s time to set some goals for 2013. This is the year of the snake, which symbolizes intelligence and grace, two things sorely lacking from our online lives, which are often filled with cheap memes and lazy jokes. Below is a list of things that people should stop doing on the internet because they only contribute to our collective stupidity.
Saying “What is this, I don’t even”
Sometimes we see something so stupid or crazy or bizarre that we are left speechless. At such moments, we nevertheless want to register our shock, even if the words to do so escape us. This is how “what is this, I don’t even” was born. But it’s now used as lazy shorthand for unoriginal people who just can’t be bothered to write anything worthwhile in response to, say, a weird video.
It’s just not clever anymore. If you’re truly dumbstruck by something you see online, don’t say anything.
Making “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters
These delightfully British propaganda posters from the Second World War are genuinely cool. Even though the original posters weren’t widely seen by the British public, it’s still nice to think a people facing annihilation at the hands of the Third Reich would have such a stoic response. Don’t worry about the Nazis: keep calm and carry on.
But since entering public consciousness the in last few years, the countless parodies of the “keep calm” theme have all but erased the significance of the phrase. Everyone with a shitty joke or a dumb event to promote can make one of these images, but they’re so overdone by this point that it’s just time to stop. I don’t want to “keep calm and go to Ted’s barbecue.” Fuck you, Ted.
Using hashtags on Facebook
People barely use hashtags correctly on Twitter, where the damn things actually serve a purpose. Using hashtags in your Facebook status updates, though, is beyond stupid and shows that you don’t know what you’re doing. It only adds noise to an already noisy platform that everyone is already busy pumping full of baby photos and event pages for things that aren’t actually events. #Stop.
Posting 2006-style status updates
Speaking of Facebook, Zuckerballs removed the “is” from status updates over five years ago, so if you’re still posting things like “John Smith… is back from work” then you’re doing it wrong. Incidentally, the Is Crowd also loves vaguebooking about how much they hate drama even though their lives seems to be unending soap operas full of unnamed people that have been total bitches and why can’t people just get along already?
You know what? No status updates for anyone in 2013.
Saying “said no one ever” ever again
This is a common Twitter line that got old before it got funny. The formulation is an unlikely declaration like “cookies suck” or “let’s fuck dogs” or “I love Joseph Kony” that is then revealed to be said by “no one ever.” Ooh, zing.
It’s the updated version of saying something and then adding “Not!” afterwards, which has thankfully disappeared for the most part but we still need to stop the “no one ever” nonsense.
”I love those people who drive 15 below the speed limit right in front of me.” -Said no one ever
— Julia Gomez (@JuliaMGomez) January 3, 2013
I love third wheeling… said no one ever
— Emily Jordan (@EmilyJords) January 3, 2013
yes!! Time to do homework! “Said no one ever.”#F*ckschool #ihatehomework
— Chase Griffin (@petergriffin_24) January 3, 2013
Ha ha ha ha ha. I’m rofling out loud.
Using Instagram
Look, I get it. Kidz these days like to wear their backwards hats and baggy jeans and listen to their Walkmans and share Instagrams with all their classmates. And yes, for many people it’s not actually about photography but about using those snapshots as a starting point for conversation and blah blah blah.
Unfortunately, most people lead uninteresting lives, which means their Instagram photos are of the painfully mundane things we all encounter in our everyday lives, just with a filter added so suddenly your bowl of porridge looks like… a bowl of porridge with lens flare! How that is supposed to inspire any meaningful discussion beats me. Other than food, most of what I see on Instagram is self-portraits, with circles of self-portraitists all going around complimenting each other’s self-portraits. Maybe this is fun for some people, and it would be fine if it was all kept on Instagram, but all those photos inevitably leak out to places where you can’t avoid them. Instagram is lame, go Snapchat.
Pretending “nom nom nom” is acceptable
This is a supposedly cute thing people write to accompany photos of animals eating. Sometimes it is also a supposedly cute thing people say about their own meals. It’s not cute, and no animal I have ever heard of makes this noise when it eats.
“you just won the internet”
Often thrown out as a compliment to someone who posts something funny or insightful, “you just won the internet” has become the new +1. The motivation is noble, wanting to recognize the people who make our online lives slightly less boring, but it’s also a bit lazy. However, if you must declare someone victorious, a suitable replacement is “Winner winner, chicken dinner.”
Inspiring ourselves
The internet is a global network whose power source is inspirational quotes and photos, which dedicated inspiration miners work long and hard to shovel into the furnaces at Tumblr, HuffPost, BuzzFeed, and your aunt’s Facebook profile. Without a constant source of moving words and pictures the internet will simply cease to exist. It doesn’t matter that most of the quotes are trite messages like “love yourself” or simply misattributed to Gandhi, or that slideshows of people hugging at gay pride rallies would actually be more interesting with some context. We just need to keep pushing out inspiration or else the computer screens will go dark.
Talking about bacon
It’s just pork belly, everyone. Let’s stop with the over-the-top bacon worship. We don’t need The Daily Bacon, bacon haikus, or bacon Christmas trees. To paraphrase Natalie Dee, we clearly don’t eat that much fucking bacon in our actual lives, so let’s stop talking about it online.
Checking privileges
This is a favourite of the holier-than-thou pseudo-intellectuals who think you can’t argue any point without first “checking your privilege.” — that is, without acknowledging that you may have some elevated position in society, benefiting from your race, gender, sexual orientation and the like. As a result, any discussion that touches on topics like race, gender or inequality — even tangentially — can soon get shut down by people who will declare certain privileges to have gone unchecked.
To be clear, there are many people who espouse all sorts of dumb ideas online without recognizing that their view is not necessarily the right view, or that people with different lived experiences will disagree. I’d like to think a lack of empathy is the problem here, with some writers unable to imagine the plight of women, racial or sexual minorities, etc. But throwing out “privilege” rarely adds to the discussion; it simply reduces everyone to a crude checklist and charges discussions with accusations of bigotry where none may exist.
As the New Statesman’s Tom Midland writes, “Prejudice exists. We live in a radically unjust world. But turning our personal circumstances into some sort of pissing contest achieves precisely nothing.”
The privilege-checking is, of course, an phenomenon of the left, which has yet to mount a serious challenge to the calamitous right-wing policies that brought us a decade of senseless wars, growing inequality and a financial collapse from which the West is still recovering. Instead, too many people are obsessed with running around privilege-checking each other on blogs.
Then again, I haven’t checked my male blogger privilege, so what do I know?
Commenting
Most blogs are improved by having comments, with readers and writers collaborating in an ongoing way and sharing ideas. Big news sites, on the other hand, have agreed to a devil’s bargain whereby they get millions more pageviews in return for letting strangers call each other Nazis. This is clearly not serving anyone’s interest and it should stop. And if you really want to have comments open to the public that don’t also become hives of racism and bigotry, you should moderate them as strictly as the New York Times does.
Agree or disagree? Call me a Nazi in the comments!