The god of Facebook must be an Old-Testament god, because he keeps unleashing plagues. Most of the time, we politely refer to them as “phenomenona” or even “virals,” but really, it's more like swarms of locusts or frogs or, as the case may be, pictures of cats, or chain letters, or invitations from people you hardly know to events you don't want to attend.
And now, it's a plague of factoids. Specifically, lists of “25 Random Things About Me,” a kind of get-to-know-you fad that's been propagating like mad on Facebook, having appeared as mysteriously as a lake-load of frogs raining on a Texas town. The idea is that those who partake post an online letter containing 25 facts about themselves: basic statistics, small details, childhood traumas, odd neuroses. Estimates put the number of “25 Random Things” notes written in the last month in the millions.
Facebook, of course, is a platform for self-definition. It's a place where people go to strut their stuff, to have conversations in public, to perform being the person they want to be. So it's only natural that a fad in which people describe themselves would catch on. Most entries range from the cheery to the anodyne; many seem to contain the kind of self-promotional basics you'd put into an online-dating profile.
But the better ones are the more personal. People hold the oddest secrets. You might post that your mother chased you around the house with a dead bumblebee at the age of six, leaving you with a lifelong phobia of things with stingers. Or you might write that you feel doomed never to experience love like a normal person. It all fits.
Fill-in-the-blanks chain letters are an old digital rite. They were a staple of e-mail forwards and, later, blogs. Usually, they involved answering a series of mostly asinine questions, forwarding the results to your friends, and demanding they do the same. This kind of thing usually results in as much irritation as it does enthusiastic participation, and so these letters would pop up and fizzle almost as fast.
But not “25 Random Things.” This fad has spread like a particularly enthusiastic strain of bird flu. Facebook users the continent over have been logging in to discover more and more people repackaging their lives in list form. This, in turn, has led to a particular fascination with the fad, which is currently being dissected in any number of publications, online and off, many of them wondering where the craze originated. (Nobody knows.)
The interest is understandable. “25 Random Things” poses a peculiar question: Why has this particular fad not just gone viral, but become an epidemic, when so many before it didn't? Everybody knows that the Web and conspicuous self-disclosure go together like cheese and stink. But of all the opportunities the Web provides, why have scores of people decided to accept this invitation to blurt it all out?
There are answers. Lesson one: Never underestimate the power of lists. There's a reason that the Internet is flooded with the things, and that some websites have made lucrative businesses out of list-only formats. Lists are easy to read, and – more to the point – they're easy to write. As anybody who has tried to string more than two sentences together knows, writing is much more fun without the hassle of having to assemble ideas into any specific order.
Lesson two: Never underestimate the power of randomness. It's a code word that beckons to the wayward youth of today. Somewhere along the way, the word “random” ceased to have anything to do with statistics, and started meaning something closer to “that which has no quality control.” Modern randomness is a concept flexible enough to embrace the cheerful, the oddball, the inane and the profoundly questionable. In other words, most everything you'll find on Facebook. If people had been asked to write “25 Interesting Things” instead, the fad might have never got off the ground.
Lesson three: Never underestimate a fad that can harness its haters. People tend to have one of two reactions to the “25 Random Things” phenomenon. Some burble with happiness at having discovered that someone was so ashamed of her feet as an adolescent that she would yell “PRIVATE FEET!” every time her stepfather passed by. Others think it's irritating.
But unlike chain messages that circulated by e-mail, the irritated have options beyond rolling their eyes and abstaining. Those who don't feel like joining the self-disclosure have been adopting another tactic: satire. One person took to posting lists of facts composed entirely of lies. (“4. I invented the piano key necktie.”) I wrote a list myself, but did so in the voice of a cat, which happened to be nearby and seemed to have a lot more going on in her head than I did in mine. Even the abstainers get co-opted into churning out lists, and so the fad self-perpetuates.
The flexibility of the format might have helped get “25 Random Things” going, but in the end, it owes its biblical-flood proportions to its own popularity. It's the network effect that powers everything online: The more people are doing it, the more incentive their friends have to join in.
Enormous Web fads are like the weather. It comes, it goes, and no amount of praying is going to stop it.
