Before this morning, I had only one Facebook friend who had adopted the middle name “Hussein” — an acquaintance I acted with back in Ohio. After today’s NYT trend piece, I now have six.
I can’t help but feel that adopting a meme after you’ve read about it in the New York Times isn’t just a cardinal violation of the Hipster Code of Conduct, but a total misuse of social media. As laid out in the article, the point of the meme isn’t just to declare support for Senator Obama — heaven knows, there are dozens of other ways to do that on Facebook alone — but to force a reconsideration in one’s own friends of the supposedly “dangerous,” “un-American” nature of the man’s middle name. It’s a brilliant idea, using the individual connections of social networking to influence individual political attitudes.
But if you don’t interact online with people who would judge someone negatively based on the associations “Hussein” presents, it’s a useless gesture, and I doubt many Yalies do have Facebook friends who fit that description. Furthermore, while a few friends spontaneously adopting the name Hussein might be recognized as a political statement, and therefore merit some consideration by those who would otherwise draw bigoted conclusions, dozens of friends doing so can’t be seen as anything other than “the next Facebook trend,” and therefore doesn’t provoke much further thought at all — sabotaging its purpose.
The rapidity with which memes can become mass phenomena on the Internet is astounding, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be a mass phenomenon. When we turn every gesture into a Gesture (a wave into The Wave), we blunt the edge of the original action. Maybe once we start treating everything on the Internet as a new toy, we’ll be able to develop notions of scale and proportion; more likely, though, the capitalist confidence that spontaneous, unchecked growth will allow everything to find its proper place will defeat inclinations toward more cautious planning. The Internet never found a good idea it couldn’t broadcast, but this may be far too much of a good thing,
“But if you don’t interact online with people who would judge someone negatively based on the associations “Hussein” presents, it’s a useless gesture, and I doubt many Yalies do have Facebook friends who fit that description.”
That is in fact not a safe assumption.
My new middle name: Danger.
Well, it’s always been my middle name.