In the beginning was the tribal campfire, where we all heard the same stories.
If that seems like an odd way to start an explanation of a digital meme, hang on for the ride!
For the first 100,000 years or so of human existence, your childhood friends became the friends of your adulthood and old age, if you were lucky to live that long. There were no separate work friends and home friends, parenting associates and golfing buddies.
The people in your tribe were all the people you knew. Strangers were rare and not particularly welcome. While there were surely taboos and secrets, modern ideas about privacy would have seemed as incomprehensible as string theory.
And everyone around your fire had heard the same things about you and about each other.
Accelerate through the iron and bronze ages, the various empires, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and come to a screeching halt at the dawn of the 21st Century.
Our lives are now fragmented. We move through circles of humanity with members of one circle rarely meeting those form another. The mom who sits next to you during Little League games meets your workday lunch partner from downtown? Where? How?
Roll briskly through the infancy of the World Wide Web. Slide from Fidonet to Usenet, to the Compuserve and Prodigy forums, to the Well and the digital park that was AOL. In each of these new places, people were suddenly and instantly “together,” sharing personal information across boundaries of time and space.
And now our ride pulls up to the new great online social networks. Where the members are no longer only the early adopters, those hardy digital explorers who prided themselves on knowing code. Or even the next wave of pioneers, setting up online homesteads and carving out new realties.
Sometime in late 2008 or early 2009, we finally saw the rolling wave of digital settlers surge onto the MySpace and Facebook. These newcomers the Internet equivalent of townspeople. Many have no particular interest in code or computers, but have been pulled in by the promise of a community that’s not so different from what they’re used to.
Slate’s technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo writes in February 2009 that “there is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook. The site has crossed a threshold – it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant.”
About that same time, Jason Falls, director of social media for Doe Anderson Advertising in Louisville, Ky, tells the Dallas Morning News:
“My mom ‘friended’ me a couple of weeks ago on Facebook. You know that Facebook has gone mainstream when your mom friends you.”
And for the first time in several thousand years, everybody that you know can get around the same figurative campfire: Your Friends photos (or icons or avatars) all smile, stare or leer at you from one page. And they all can have access to the same updates, postings, links or Tweets that you choose to broadcast.
But unlike the folk round that ancient campfire, these folks don’t all know the same things about you.
The woman from high school who you hadn’t seen in 30 years, your BFF from college, the guy you started dating last year, the dude who works in the next cubicle: How do you bring them all to some common understanding of who you are now and how you got here?
Enter the “Random Things” list meme.
(What’s a meme? A kind of social infection that affects the way people think or act. Like biological bugs, memes are unpredictable. Fashion trends are a good example. Why did baggy pants become popular? Will pink be the new black? Those are memes.)
For this part of the ride, take a side trip back to the era of dead-tree chain letters. You get a letter with a list of interesting stuff from a list of people, are asked to add your relevant detail and send it out to 10 people and ask them to do likewise. Breaking the chain would mean bad juju. (I hated dead-tree chain letters.)
Chug over to your local toy store, where “icebreaker” board games can still be found: Blurt, Would You Rather…,Loaded Questions, Boxers or Briefs, Truth or Dare. These games are still popular because they push participants into revealing personal details and can turn casual acquaintances into, potentially, closer friends.
From the earliest days of the Internet, the old dead-tree chain letter formats migrated online as people e-mailed their friends with lists of questions and encouraged them to do likewise. But MySpace and Facebook changed the possibilities by shifting the point-to-point communication of e-mail to the online equivalent of putting up a billboard that stays up and is visible to friends – and friends of friends, and members of your networks (who may in fact be strangers).
The Random Things meme is the newest digital descendant of those chain letters and party games — a way to use the new technology to scratch the oldest of psychological itches.
In 2007, the most common format for the list meme was “6 Random Things About Me.” By mid-2008, the most common number shifted to 16. In December 2008, the standard number of Things on a list popped to 25.
And with the start of 2009, what had been something like a low-level infection, with a few people making new lists every day, turned into an online epidemic. By the millions and the tens of millions, people started compiling their lists and tossing them online for the world to see.
Why did it happen then? Pull the threads together:
People are hardwired with a need to know about others – and tell others about themselves.
The modern era has fragmented personal communities into tiny and unsatisfying subgroups.
Facebook, MySpace, etc, offer the opportunity for people to create a defragmented Community of Me, with darned near everybody they ever knew.
By the tens of millions, new people flood onto the social network sites, achieving a critical mass that creates it’s own peer approval and peer pressure to participate.
And the “Random Things” meme offer the chance for each online settler to bring all of their various sub-groups of friends up to the same speed on any 25 things that they choose to share.
Not to mention that lots of us love an audience and think we can write.
(There is, of course, nothing random about “Random Things.” There’s a reason for every item that appears on every list.)
How infectious is this meme? Somewhere between extremely and unbelievably.
At this moment, Facebook has more than 5 million “Random Things” lists hosted in its notes. But the meme quickly migrated out of the relatively controlled social network sites onto hundreds of thousands of public web pages and blogs.
A Google search for “25 Random Things” shows close to 300,000 hits. A broader search for “Random Things” finds more than 15 million hits, most of which appear to be lists or links to lists. (I anticipate updating these numbers regularly, the way McDonald’s used to count “customers served.”)
This is where I enter the story.
I got onto Facebook just about the time the Random Things meme started to take hold. I started reading lists done by my friends. And then my friend’s friends. And then went Googling for lists done by people with whom I have no known connection. I discovered that many of the lists have at least one Thing that is thought-provoking, funny, sad, inspiring, romantic, spiritual, gross, or otherwise interesting.
I’m addicted to reading Random Things. And so are lots of other people, I’m finding. So I started developing my collection of the Best Random Things, culled from many hundreds of lists.
I’ll be passing along my favorites here. If I found it on the Internet, you’ll find a link to the full list. If I saw it on a social network site, I got a separate copy from the author – no mere cut-and-paste.
Finally, why do I – and all of you – want to read Things about total strangers? In the words of that old song, we’re people who need people.
Return to the days of those ancient tribal fires. We have descended from people who were the most attentive to details about strangers.
Samuel Gosling is a psychology professor at the University of Texas who studies online social networks.
He told me that humans evolved to pay more attention to other people than, say, antelope pay attention to other antelope.
It’s all about the payoff, he says.
For an antelope, the biggest opportunities for good things may come from other antelope – protection, sex, directions to the best feeding grounds, sex. But the biggest threats come from other critters — lions and tigers and oh my!
But for those early humans, the biggest opportunities and the biggest threats came from other people.
“Only those of us who had a natural inclination to keep an eye on other people made it,” Gosling told me.
Which hardwired a hunger for information about other people into the human psyche – maybe particularly for information about strangers. Knowledge, after all, is power.
This might explain some of the popularity of “reality” TV.
And for why reading Best Random Things is the mental equivalent of opening a bag of salty, crunchy potato chips:
Betcha can’t read just one!
