Trending now... The Fact That I HATE Being Told What Is Trending

A couple of years back one of the few TV shows I watch, The Voice began, occasionally, telling me that such and such a contestant or such and such a judge was trending on Twitter. Though I have a Twitter account, I have not even signed into it more than a few times. So these little mentions of what was trending would pull me out of my escapist mindset and would make me start thinking exactly that.... I never sign into my Twitter account because I don't care what's trending and what isn't...

In fact my ONLY "tweet" ever was something to the effect of "Do eighty million people really need to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch???"

This past Monday night I chose to partake in a rare enjoyment of mine. I watched professional wresting on cable. The first or second time I've done so since having access to cable again - after a four year period of not having it. And I realized that not five minutes would pass without some announcer or graphic popping up to let me know what was freaking trending! It really irked me and ruined my enjoyment of the show. It kept pulling me OUT of the experience.

So, just now, I wanted to research a post I was contemplating making, to fact check something, so I opened a new tab, arbitrarily chose Bing as a search engine for my query, typed in what I wished, pushed enter, and began reading my results... only I immediately began to be bothered by a large bar on the right of my screen that I don't recall seeing ( or noticing ) before. And what did it say???

NOW TRENDING!

Now C'MON!!!!!!!!!!! I am sure that some dude made two hundred gazillion bucks for creating Twitter. And good for him. And I know that there are a LOT of people who just love to "tweet" every eighteen seconds so that they can feel like they are celebrities in their own little worlds. Hell, I was a prominent blogger once upon a time and I know my ego got stoked as I watched my hit count rise. But, for the love of Pete, BING wasn't using 1/3 of their page space to tell the entire 'Net that I'd blogged! Katie Couric never broke out of a news story to say "Trending... Heff (or any of you either) just posted a thread to ATS!

Twitter is a place to tell people what mundane thing you just did. So why are words like "bathroom" "food" and "bored" not trending??? Huh??????? I say "Kim Kardashian" maybe once every three months. I eat, sleep, use the bathroom, and get bored way more often than that. So why is KK nearly always trending????

If you love Twitter? Awesome! God love ya. I don't spite you one bit. I don't even spite Twitter itself. It's a genius idea of how to turn some simple code into a vast fortune. But does every single friggin' media entity in the entire known universe really have to update me on what's trending every five seconds???

Am I the ONLY one who has just had it up to ~here~ with the whole trending thing?

Now if you really want to put me into the looney bin, get half a billion people to tweet to this link to this thread - which will make ME trend. Then, when the guy on TV says "BTW, Hefficide is trending on Twitter" I promise you, I will fall into a fetal ball and never get back up.

~Heff

It's on every news broadcast, I occasionally watch a little bit of wrestling on Monday nights, maybe 15-20 mins. and they plaster all over the screen whats trending a dozen times, Sportscenter has gotten into this dirty little habit as well...It's friggin' everywhere man. Any type of tech show you watch it's trending this and trending that..I'm very tempted to create a twit account to tell all these hipster trenders to shut the frig up

reply to post by Hefficide


Now trending on ATS..........
Heff is pissed about trending

Twitter is interesting. In theory, it could be a pretty powerful tool for the population. In practice though, it seems to feed in to the superficial tendencies of American culture. Shock value and glamour is valued over substance and information.

About a week ago I looked into Twitter for the first time. Pretty late to that party. I scanned through the top accounts thinking maybe some of my favorite entertainers would be worth looking at.

I thought it was funny, or maybe pathetic, that the top accounts were Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rhianna... a couple other pop stars that I can't remember (Britney Spears, maybe?)...

The point is that President Obama's account was #6 behind a handful of diva's.

Probably because Obama's account isn't very entertaining, more of a donate 15$ or wow look at what Romney said type thing every 10 minutes.

Bill Gate's had an interesting thing going on about reinventing the toilet. But most of the top account were useless promotional tactics by entertainers and athletes.

At least we now have some concrete data on just how braindead our culture is

There was one pretty cool account I stumbled on, though. It was a comedy thing called the Tweet of God. I just brought up the page because when I last looked at it there were some funny statements that apply to thinking on ATS. Here are some recently:

"It's not that things are getting worse. It's that your ability to notice them are getting better."

"Today Fox News showed live coverage of a man committing suicide. It then returned to it's ongoing efforts to get you to commit suicide."

"I used to work in mysterious ways. Now, like many of you, I'm looking for work in mysterious ways."


twitter.com...

I just responded to an anti-Twitter rant by recommending a Twitter account....

Click.

Thought it'd be funny to look into what was trending on Twitter today. Had a whole rant prepared about how what Lady Gaga ate for lunch isn't as important as mass poverty.

I was pleasantly surprised. The #1 trend of today was some free ticket give away to a concert in Indonesia. So, yeah there are a lot more things in the world to be talking about than a music concert.

But, behind that was a trend of tweeting someone that makes you happy. That's pretty positive, no problem there.

And #3 was a trend of tweeting what you hope will happen someday.
www.twee.co...

Those are pretty good things for people to think about. Although I'm sure everyone said Lady Gaga makes them happy and that they hope to meet her some day.

If priorities were straight, worldwide inequality would be trending #1 until everyone has legitimate opportunity.

reply to post by PatrickGarrow17


You're absolutely right. It can be a powerful, useful tool, but it's been hijacked by all these actors and entertainers that need constant attention every single second of every single day..I mean really, do we need to know what that waste of oxygen Snookie had for lunch or what new multi-million dollar home the useless Kardashians just bought

Since it's a Saturday morning ( at least where I am at ) and ATS is slow... I started goofing around on the web and found out this about @Hefficide....



An open message to whoever owns Twitter.... If you can get that number up by about thirty or forty thousand without me having to actually log in to my Twitter account... I may consider posting a rebuttal thread to this one, talking about how much I LOVE being inundated by "what's trending now" messages.....

Just sayin'.

~Heff

Click here for more information.

reply to post by Hefficide


I don't use Twitter or Facebook and could care less about what is "trending", and yet I cannot turn on the television or radio without being constantly bombarded with the latest "trending" news. I can't even watch the local weather report without being informed of what is trending! It is my hope that all of this "trending" is in itself only a trend that will be replaced with something else very soon.

On another note, recently on Friday night I have seen the last 30 minutes of Smackdown, as it is on right before Haven. I almost forgot how much fun it is! I used to go with my granny when I was a kid to see live wrestling every month at the old Beaumont Sports Arena (no longer in existence I'm afraid). I remember seeing a man wrestle a bear! It was WAY cool, and after the match the bear stood on it's hind legs and drank a bottle of 7-up. It was always great fun!

I agrre, but its one more reason i dont own a tv. Also, im sick of hearing what celebrities are doing. Every time i listen to a top40 station some ho has to tell me all this bs about whos doing who. Why do i care? And top 40 sucks. But every 3 months or so they end up with a cool new song. Sometimes 90s alternative gets old

I think one day the "twenty teens" is going to be remembered as the worst decade ever. Like how i remember the 90s. Back then we had the pentium! You know what the pentium meant to normal people? That we could finally afford a 486. And 386s dont compare at all to a 486, whereas a pentium and a 486 isnt that different. Big difference from 16mhz 75mhz lol. The 586 was what? 133mhz? Now i have a 2ghz pc in my pocket (android). Wtf? but now we have bs like trending....ugh

its a fact that most entertainers are nwo tools and bound to the illuminati for their fame and fortune.

so wouldn't it make sense for them that a powerful tool that can reach millions be purposely sabotaged with useless tweets and self promotion.

imagine someone with 20 million "followers" telling them to register to vote for ron paul instead of checking out going to www. whatever to get a chance to win some lame prize.

don't forget how twitter became mainstream. when the biggest douchebag in hollywood, ashton kutcher challenged larry king to a twitter follower contest.

who can reach a million first.

tell me that both of them weren't paid massive amounts of money or stock to promote it.

after that every moron with an internet connection jumped on the bandwagon and started signing off with their twitter handle.

I do not like the trending thing...and I do find it annoying. A very few times I have clicked on a topic to find out what is so important; and it is usually something very boring; like (a famous so and so person) had a milkshake at McDonalds; just ridiculous stuff! I simply do not care. So...anyway I stopped reading anything that is trending.

Heff nailed twitter to the wall... when you look at their "trending" topic, you have to wonder how some stupid hashtag becomes more important than a global issue.

It seems that there are two tiers to twitter.. The people who get the blue checkmarks, and the rest of the population. I'm not sure what the criteria is for the blue checkmarks, but these are the hollywood types who *someone* thinks are important people. If you look at the content of these important people, you will see their agenda is mostly self-promotion, or promotion of some sponsor. The top tier of twitter users have like millions of followers, and the other tier of users have followers in the hundreds. You can sort of tell to whom twitter caters, and what they promote.

I wonder why facebook didn't just gobble up twitter right off the bat as being a social media tool. That said, twitter by itself is a really boring place to be. My g/f says there is entertainment value in twitter, but I just can't see it.
Someone on TV just said "Instagram" is twitter for people who can't read... Haha think about it. Just how they made money off these applications defies logic, however the motives of these companies is becoming apparent to the masses, and it's getting stale.

reply to post by Hefficide


Though I read the whole post, I S&F'ed right after I read: "Do eighty million people really need to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch???"

Don't know about you, but I think I hate trending because I could care less about the topic or celebrity. Now I'm sitting here wondering what trending idea I would be interested in and nothing jumps to mind. Maybe Hawkings new revelation on the universe. Or, R.Dawkins now believes in god.

But, it doesn't matter anyway. After spending a few weeks on Twitter it quickly became a joke, with comments like: "Mmm, popcorn." "Drinking water now." "Picking up the kids at school." Yawnnnn!

I think what did it for me was when someone posted, "Hobby, I like looking out windows." Are you freakin' kiddin' me????

Click here for more information.

Ah, the sweet irony... I write serious threads and I am called a disinfo manipulation expert with an evil agenda. I write comical threads about Twitter, point out that I've only logged in a handful of times, and even show that my Twitter page is so pointless and useless that it's worth ONE dollar... And now I am an egomaniac.

I wonder what attacks I'll get if I post in the food forum?

The other, real irony? I stopped posting in the political forums to keep OUT of trouble.

Some peoples children....

~Heff

reply to post by Hefficide


Heff,I love this thread.


I don't facebook,twitter or all that other useless internet garbage that everyone MUST do.
Seeing the whats trending thing seems like an insult to my intellect.

To me what it says is....this is whats cool right now so jump on the bandwagon if you want to be cool too.
I see it as mindless and insecure.
I almost always ignore sentences that start out with "do you know what you should do" or "you should" or "you gotta"
Trending is just more of that garbage to me.

I only need my own approval....what everyone else is doing is of no concern to me.

We have that same problem here on ats.
Someone posts a thread on some topic that gets a hundred flags and than you see others trying to post the same thing hoping to get the same results.

The only trend i follow is being able to look myself in the face every morning and have no regrets.

#Trendingmeansbeingspammed lol

reply to post by Vaedur




That is exactly what I was trying to convey!

I can recall a blissful time, not so long ago, when being spammed was something one associated with their Yahoo mail account. We all have one ( or gmail, or whichever variant one prefers ) and we all are used to the reality that somehow, some way, either coupon or pron ads were going to make their way in - no matter how tightly we controlled the filters and how secretive we tried to be. Eventually we'd sign up for something or other, online, use the email addy and get spammed.

And we're also all accepting that if you go to sites online, you'll see ads.

But when the local news starts doing it??? When you turn on your favorite show to try and escape reality for half an hour and suddenly a splash screen appears saying "The star of this show is trending NOW on Twitter - WORLD WIDE!!!"???

Is the Internet so attention deprived that it needs to suck us back in should we abandon it for half an hour just to watch a show?

After writing this thread, and pondering it, I had an epiphany of sorts... Smart phone marketing. What better way to get us all to buy the new droid or iPhone than to constantly remind us of Twitter or Facebook? What better way to literally chain us to our e-devices?

Mark my words, theaters will pick this up ( if they have not already ) and these "now trending" messages will start invading our movie going experience.

How about electronic billboards that can update whenever something related to the billboard subject trends? Like a McDonalds billboard that lets us know when McRib is trending.

My theory, we should reshoot the entire Ron Howard - Tom Hanks film "Castaway" and replace Wilson, the beach ball, with a smart phone that was bundled with a trickle charger. Then, about ten minutes into the film, after being told what's trending for the thousandth time... Tom Hanks can smash Wilson against a rock - never feel bad about it, and hang himself from that clifftop tree. Sadder ending? Yeah, but at least we'd all have an hour of our lives back that the current film robs us of.

~Heff