Sometimes I just do not care about what the big collective you are talking about.
I don’t mean that in the vein of a conversation. I’m talking about twitter. And media events like Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead are deliberately designed to promote an online buzz, making sure that no matter what, people are going to be focused on these things. Branding means we use hash-tags on Twitter to promote, but also as a courtesy to people who want to avoid (say) spoilers. That’s pretty nice, though it only takes one person being thoughtless to fuck it up.
That is to say, when people start talking about the latest horrible thing in a horrible series that has been horrible for what, four fucking years now, and they’re so shocked and repulsed by it, I can sometimes avoid reading it by muting #GoT or the like. Except not, because hey, when you’re mad, you don’t always consider that.
Now here’s the problem:
Let’s say I find the discussion of ‘gal pals’ infuriating. Let’s imagine I hate hearing people complain about ‘frexting.’ That’s harder to get away from, because there are a lot of ways to talk about it without using those key words. There are people posting pictures of the newspaper article, or pretending to be sending ‘frexts’ without using the word ‘frext.’ That’s… harder. Leave twitter alone for a bit? That sometimes works! But sometimes it doesn’t, and these things last for hours at a time, sometimes days.
Let’s say I have no interest in Splatoon.
You wanna know how hard it is to mute that?
Splatoon is an incredible thing, it’s this oozing, permeating media influence. If you mute #Splatoon that won’t hide you from like, a tenth of it. Maybe if you mute words squid, kid, costumes, ink, roller, splat, splatoon and then hide all pictures (which gets you a lot of false positives) you might be able to avoid this discussion. And that’s like if you just don’t particularly want to see it.
I think it’s kinda reasonable that a boneless mollusc in a game about spreading fluid is able to smear itself everywhere, even places that don’t want to include it. If nothing else, the poetry amuses me.