There’s a storm a-comin’, so I went to the corner store to get supplies. Like, some chocolate milk. The corner store is a supermarket, so I couldn’t really expect to see people board up their windows and doors. Or maybe they did, on the third floor of their apartment building. The supermarket was quite crowded, but not because of the storm, just because it was a weekday, or any day, really.
On Twitter before Hurricane Sandy hit last year you could see a lot of New Yorkers being anxious and a lot of people from places with self-proclaimed “real weather” like Minneapolis (Minneahopeless) snarking what those fancy-pants East Coasters are afraid of. And then things broke bad and there was a lot of destruction and death and that snark stopped. And the people who made jokes suddenly felt…guilty?
So, jokes. I like them, I make them a lot. But social media definitely has changed the nature of making jokes. Used to be that it was enough for you and your conversation partner to find something funny, and maybe a third person you later told about it. (And of course the Kaiser, #obligatorysimpsonsreference). But now, like a scarily accurate upgrade of the Clap-o-Meter, you can see how many people like a joke status on Facebook. I understand there’s some star thing on Twitter as well.
All that pressure! I’m the third person I know who deletes things on FB if they haven’t gotten at least two likes in 20 minutes. Also: all that pressure to be relevant. When Paul Walker died you had the three basic reactions, “This actor has died, that’s sad” (which I find to be a reasonable position, by the way), “haha, this actor has died” (with the addition of “the irony!” because he died in a car and his most famous movie was a car movie) and “what do you care?” Yes, people can’t agree on anything.
What we can agree though, I think: What kind of a stupid-ass name for a storm is “Xaver”?