Remember the controversial Starbucks Christmas cups?
Of course not. Nobody does.
But everyone remembers trending social media posts about them.
Scratch that. That’s also incorrect. What people remember are articles like, “What people who get upset at backlash against people who cheer for the new Starbucks cups say about society”.
None of the people in the story really existed. Yet everyone felt compelled to go to social media and post about how they thought people posting about how they thought these cups were good or bad was good or bad.
The event itself wasn’t really a thing. People who experienced the non-event and shared about it weren’t much of a thing either. People commenting on the people not really experiencing the non-event were a manufactured thing. And people responding to that were a real thing. But can you really call that real?
Most trending topics and emotional stand-offs on social media are abstractions of abstractions of abstractions of things that may or may not exist concretely. It’s a constant flow of symbols attempting to convey meaning and signal it to others battling with other signals over other signals.
I don’t know that this is bad. It’s certainly interesting. What is bad is forgetting that all this abstraction is going on. If you play the game as if these are concrete realities opposing each other, you’ll get all kinds of messed up. You’ll add to the abstraction with your emotional reaction while believing you’re on the level of concretes. When you’re playing a different game than you think you’re playing, you always lose.
Remember, pretty much everything on the real-time internet is a fake reaction to a fake reaction to a fake event. Trying to layer on realness adds undue weight to these symbol games.