2014 is almost over, and every story needs a summary at the end. A lot happened this year globally and within Dougherty. Dougherty has seen many trends, especially on social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), there were five main types of posts or comments that frequently populated newsfeed. They are entertaining at first but later they get annoying with bunch of notifications (let’s be honest, who likes seeing 20 notification messages on their phone which half of them are just random trend that is just showing extra social homework to complete).  These below are only some of the ones that are “generally” thought to be annoying to most people due to spamming or etc.

First one is apps that are generally in Facebook. They usually attempt to entertain people with extreme situation in a humorous way in a “if…then” format. These are great most of the time but if and only if it doesn’t involve other people to see the results (sending out mass notification to your friends) and if it doesn’t involve very interesting experiences of getting hacked with app named “See who is stalking your Facebook profile” that was trending over Facebook recently. Yes it sounds interesting, and was very catchy to many people too, but apparently it brought very interesting experience of getting hacked. So be aware of what you are clicking.

Next are missions like LMS, 100 questions, TBH, “plug-in names from the chat” involving generally around 5 to 25 people if not more. Often, these are the the most annoying ones in the social trend. You are morally obligated to complete this because you are friends with this person who tagged you (unless you want the friendship to break) and usually these missions are time consuming and source of headache if there are too much of them piled on you. Don’t tag someone you are not actually friends with in real life for the sake of plugging in names. Trust me… It can get very awkward.

Prank statuses; there are two types. 1) Is “relationship” status that express the love of each other in a public way. It is lovely if it is true emotion that can’t resist the urge to be blessed by others. However, if the relationship posts are just designed to see people’s reaction… No offense but as this get very redundant, it can make people frown. 2) Another is a statement that instantly catches people’s attention, freaking people out at first with bold/ awkward statements such as “I cheated on my ex” or “raccoon is under my bed” but later, results in tons of messages saying “You fell into the trap.” telling certain things to post that are ridiculous and are destined to fill up the whole news feed. The most irritating part: exponentiation of the post.

Last are campaigns that usually start positively for good cause such as ALS Ice bucket challenge, raising money for research finding cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or flower/ animal picture to decrease the negativity in media feed.  I agree that the intention was great, helping the people and changing the society in a positive way. However, soon people only  concentrated on the fun of the activity than thinking of the original purpose and importance of it.

Usually people follow other just because many people are doing it blindly without really thinking what they are doing or what kind of image they will portray through their post. Our post can be very impactful in both positive and negative way. So let’s think before we post!