Social media has become a valuable tool for users to stay connected with not only their families and friends, but also their interests and passions. More importantly, and distressingly enough, it has created a cesspool of Internet users who thrive off inane trends that take their attention from their news feeds.
“Popcorning,” or the use of airbags on unsuspecting victims in what is supposed to be a non-malicious prank, has become a rage online.
The term came from the behavior guinea pigs exhibit when excited. But it’s different when people popcorn. All they need to do is place an airbag under someone else’s seat and watch hilarity ensue when someone sits on it.
But hilarity can quickly escalate into concern towards the victim’s physical well-being when the prank goes terribly wrong. Consider this example as a cautionary tale of how “non-malicious” popcorning is. 19-year old Hari Farlie who participate the popcorn prank blasted from the airbag-filled seat to the ceiling and crashed down hard, incurring a spinal damage in the process.
To add a cherry on top of this insufferable trend, his “friend” involved in the prank makes this statement: “I don’t think he thought it was going to hurt as much.”
This prank runs in line with the dangerous Knockout Game, in which innocent passersby walking down the street are punched in the jaw by a civilian coming out of nowhere. This particular activity gained significant media attention in as early as 2011 when lots of people fell victim to this vicious game.
While popcorning started out as an innocuous and vapid act that was inspired by cute guinea pigs, the Knockout Game is rooted in racism, which spawned cases of hate crime based on this “game.” An argument can be made that sensationalist media and right-wing conservatives obsessed with playing the race card attempt to pin these occurences as another race issue.
Both arguments, as valid as they are, present heated debates from opposing parties. Whether the debates contain any substance is immaterial. Sure, dialogues that bridge the gap between racial disconnect are more than welcome. But if you have right-wing conservatives jumping the gun and making sweeping generalizations about African Africans just by referring to these purported hate crimes, they looking at things from a narrow and selective point of view, making it difficult to create a platform for reform. The same goes with those who popcorning (and when I say those, I mean everybody).
Which brings us to an even bigger problem: outrage porn. There is so much noise in the world, (no) thanks to social media. It has brought out the best ways to stay connected with users from different parts of the globe, but also the worst in the content of discussions that “trend” worldwide. To make matters worse, discussion mostly centers around viral stuff that don’t make any impact in people’s way of life.
This is not to say that the Knockout Game is an irrelevant news piece that should not be up for discussion, because it sincerely begs for resolution. But blowing the news out of proportion stating that the Knockout Game is a growing trend when no data supports this claim is just irresponsible journalism.
This phenomenon can be referred to as selective exposure where certain news (and even non-news) pieces get privileged in the news feeds of users. You can attribute the exposure of viral articles and trending topics based on your preferences and social activity, which can then be attributed to the algorithms of social networking sites like Facebook, as well as advertisers disrupting your feed with their promoted posts.
As a result, some news items get discussed more than others not because they matter, but because these are the ones that appear on their feeds the most times.
This way, the asinine stems from the flaw in Facebook’s news feed algorithm. Posts about popcorning and Knockout Games are not because of chance, but because it plays within people’s interest. Not to say that this is a shame – the entire point of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is to expose users to news that matter to them. But our preferences are our downfall –they place us inside an online bubble that becomes impossible to burst out from.
Because if the news feed keeps showing these kinds of news, which are purported as news that matter to users, then what will then be of news that really matter?