Trends in Social Media Commentary That Should Be Relentlessly Mocked Until They Stop

Admittedly, I am far more online than the average person probably is, and probably more so than is healthy. Unavoidable, to do writing and media in the modern world, at least the way I do. Any accusation that my own perception might be a bit skewed accordingly could well have some merit to it.

Still, there are some social media and news media trends in the Year of Our Lord 2024 that need to be not only pointed out, but pointed at while mercilessly mocked. Let us review a few of them.

* Nothing good ever happens when you go monologuing into the front facing camera of your cell phone when alone in a vehicle. Like the old saying of being in a bar after midnight. Yes, that particular old saying is generalized hyperbole but there is much truth to it. Just because something catastrophically bad does not happen 99 times out of 100, the odds of that one catastrophic thing happening skyrockets because of the situation you yourself have created. Whatever that smoking hot take that just cannot wait until you get to someone else, it definitely needs the “count to ten” effect of driving somewhere else before venting your unfiltered thoughts directly onto the interwebs. Actors have directors for a reason. Writers have editors for a reason. Politicians have speechwriters for a reason. Cicero you are not. You – yes, you – need to at a minimum self-edit; at least to the point of not grabbing your phone and monologuing for all posterity something you didn’t properly think through. Solo car monologuing is a one-way ticket to social media character of the day, and it is entirely avoidable.

* If you can tweet from a monetized Twitter/X account, or Instagram, or Facebook, or whatever other social media promoting your monetized published piece on a website perfectly ideologically/philosophically aligned to your point of view about how badly you are “persecuted”…you ain’t. Not only is it navel-gazing narcissism to think someone disagreeing with you on the interwebs is persecution, but it is also an insult to the untold thousands persecuted to a monstrous degree, suffering, and often dying for their various faiths worldwide.

* If you are ever tempted to utter the phrase – or a similar phrase of – “this is the most (insert hyperbolic descriptor here) time in American history since the Civil War…” put your typing thumb in the nearest open desk drawer and slam it shut as hard as you can. That flash of pain is still nothing compared to the century and a half of strife, struggle, pain, suffering, and overcoming our predecessors went through to give you the immense privilege of pretending they did not so you could make your online bloviating seem far more historically important than it is. Your political choice between two people for an elected office pales to reconstruction, two World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, economic upheaval, mass immigration movements to integrate, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and on and on that list goes practically forever before it gets to whatever it is you are all fired up about on a random Tuesday morning. Your nine-word Starbucks order being more expensive is an issue to discuss, not a self-serving comparison to overcoming the injustices of the past. Things that are different are not the same, and your clout won’t go up by attaching ahistorical nonsense to your hot take.

Keep your bearing. Cool your thumbs. Use the revolver theory of life and apply it to social media and news media: If you only have six bullets from now until the day you die to really fight something, is this something you want to use one of those six bullets on?

With rare exceptions, the answer is no. Especially in an environment where everything everywhere all at once is life-or-death biggest thing of the century of the week…until the next news segment at least.

Keep your bearing, and let us be in, but not of, the purposefully curated chaos of the times we live in.

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This is an excerpt from the author’s Sunday newsletter News, Notes, and Notions available on the Heard Tell SubStack