One more thought about #testicles , #censorship , and the trending list

One more thought about #testicles , #censorship , and the trending list

I see Shawn Holster is checking out the fallout from his testicles thing the other day. Here’s a fact: I didn’t know who Shawn Holster was on Friday, and I’m pretty sure that Shawn had no idea who I was on Friday. Who else didn’t I know on Friday? Let’s see, Michelle Marie, Ward Anderson, Moan Lisa, Tom Rolfson, Rob Gordon, and a wide variety of others that I likely would have never interacted with had it not been for a crude joke played via the Trending List.

I mentioned to someone else in my circles that we G+ers are a unique bunch – particularly whiny, somewhat elitist, and we tend to have (an arguably false sense of) intellectual superiority whenever we compare ourselves to the average user of Facebook or Twitter. This aspect of the G+ user base unsettles me for how off putting it can be, and watching the hashtag for testicles trend tells me exactly why. Whether you like the Trend List or not, the reality is that the Trend List and this particular trend has brought together users who might have never interacted with each other period and probably would not have interacted with each other otherwise. The Trend List and this particular trend spurred content creation – whether that content was crude humor, image macros, or lengthy essays and discussions, it put spotlight on content creation in a world where most G+ detractors like to claim that this social network is a ghost town and most G+ users only spend 3 minutes per month on the social network. Before you come rushing in and saying that the last bit is not the case for you exclusively, the point is that it (the trend list and the testicles hashtag) gave absolute proof of a fast paced community within a social network that is commonly referenced as having no active users.

One final thing that I believe that the Trend List and the testicles trend did is allow Google Plus to lighten up. Like many others, I’ve been on here since the beginning. Check my profile and you will see that I am NO stranger to 1,000+ word essays, intellectual discussion, and actual engagement between a user and the people they follow. It’s just that “testiclegate” reminded me of a post danah boyd made way back in the early days of G+. For those of you that don’t know, Danah has written excellent research on social networks and even made a compelling argument regarding race in relation to the public transition from MySpace to FaceBook. With that said, danah flat out said that the G+ community was coming off as a little too academic, to paraphrase her words. I would go further and suggest that some users have taken that to the point of elitism implying that users who participate in the Trends, the hashtags, and other social networks aren’t as intelligent (or rather, “bright”, as I read somewhere). To that, I suggest that certain people should simply stop being dicks and get off their pseudo-intellectual high horse.

Like the real world itself, intellectual conversation, debate, and discussion can coexist with toilet humor, colorful language, and pop stars like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj. Simply looking down on who’s participating in these trends for today is not only prejudice in that you’re casting judgment on others based on knee jerk and prudish reactions, but you’re ignoring the original content that can be created, that has been created, and the community that it can potentially create via active engagement between users in that specific trend stream.

In essence, before you judge the merits of the trending list, trends, and those who might participate in the trends, consider the positives that can (and has) come from this form of meeting and interacting with new users. If you don’t want to interact with those outside of your current circles or you think you’re too good for them, then more power to ya; but as Jesus once said, logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The trending topics are a much easier way to be social and maybe even network with others participating in the stream by engaging with them. That’s the point of a place like this I would imagine, especially if you are trying to use this place as an interest based social network like Twitter since for many people – family and friends have not yet adopted this service in ways that we would like. So lighten up, have fun, and remember that intellectual discourse can take place in the same arena as a pee-pee and poopy joke; RELAX!