SARAH MORGAN will defend New Jersey
passionately to anyone who will listen (No. 3). Max Evjen belonged to
the high school band, Little Blue Fuzzy Things (No. 18). Jim Beaver has
lived through two typhoons (No. 22).
Do these oddball facts look familiar? If not, you clearly haven’t
been spending much time online lately, where the latest digital fad — a
chain-letter-cum-literary exercise called “25 Random Things About Me” —
is threatening to consume what little remaining free time and privacy
we have.
Here’s how it works: friends send you an e-mail message (or, on
Facebook,
“tag” you in a note posted to their profile) with 25 heartfelt
observations about themselves — like “I named my son after a man I’ve
never met” or “I once paid good money to see Whitesnake in concert” —
along with instructions for you to follow suit. You are then expected
to gin up your own clever list and foist it upon 25 people, including
the friend who asked for it in the first place.
Unlike the chain letters of yesteryear, no money changes hands and
no one is threatened with apocalyptic bad luck for refusing to comply.
Yet the practice has spread so far and so fast that a
Google
search for “25 Random Things About Me” yields 35,700 pages of results,
almost all of which seem to have been created in the last two weeks.
“It’s really interesting to sit there and try to think of 25 things
that you’re willing to tell other people but that they don’t already
know about you,” said Ms. Morgan, a health care industry publicist who
has kissed 6 1/2 boys (No. 16), is legally blind (No. 19) and didn’t go
to school until the fourth grade (No. 7).
“It was harder than I thought it would be, honestly,” she added. “I guess I’m kind of an open book.”
On Facebook, the apparent epicenter of the craze, nearly five
million notes on people’s profiles have been created in the last week,
and many of them are lists of “25 Random Things.” The note-creation
figure is double the previous week and larger than any other single
week in Facebook history, and Facebook executives say that the “Random
Things” craze is driving it.
“Other types of content, like photos or news stories, have spread
rapidly and widely on Facebook, but this is the first time I’ve noticed
a note gain such distribution,” Brandee Barker, a Facebook spokeswoman,
said.
Ms. Barker, by the way, likes to dance alone in the living room (No.
10) and calls buttered tortillas one of her favorite meals (No. 2).
As with anything on the Internet, why this particular distraction
has suddenly become a phenomenon is anyone’s guess. For most, it seems
to be a creative way to indulge in social networking without coming off
as needy or shamelessly self-absorbed.
“It’s a brainstorming exercise,” said Anne Trubek, an associate
professor at Oberlin College who said she used to give nearly identical
assignments 15 years ago to beginning writing students. “It’s used to
get people to think about ideas without the pressure of developing a
thesis or an argument.”
Back then, Professor Trubek said, “People did not write unless they
were assigned to, so the pressure of sitting down to write made them
very tight.” Today, because of the Internet, people are more accustomed
to writing about themselves, so the assignment has fallen out of favor.
Instead, she observed, people have begun assigning it to themselves.
Professor Trubek, for instance, was the fastest kid in her fifth-grade
class (No. 5), and she still watches “Survivor” (No. 2).
People often write their “25 Random Things” at the request of a
friend, which is a tempting excuse. It was for Jim Beaver, a
professional actor, who said it was the reason he wrote and shared a
list with his 1,790 Facebook friends (17 of whom he claims to know
personally).
“
Marlon Brando
once said, ‘An actor is a fella who, if you aren’t talking about him,
isn’t listening,’ ” said Mr. Beaver, whose television credits include a
role on
HBO’s “Deadwood.”
Mr. Beaver is no amateur when it comes to digital
stream-of-consciousness writing. His book, “Life’s That Way: A Memoir,”
which will be published in April, started as a series of nightly e-mail
updates to friends in the year after his daughter was found to have
autism and his wife, cancer.
Mr. Beaver said he found writing to be therapeutic and enjoyed the
“25 Random Things” exercise. For the record, he did not know what a
bagel was until he was 27 (No. 3).
“I think the key to it is the word ‘random,’ ” Mr. Beaver said. “I
just find it fascinating to look at what people reveal when there isn’t
a particular requirement.”
Despite how it might feel to those who have suddenly been bombarded
with these lists, the meme itself did not come out of nowhere. To the
contrary, viral e-mail messages designed to help friends discover
unusual facts about one another are as old as e-mail itself.
Early adopters of e-mail may remember a list of 100 questions —
“Where did you go to high school?” “What is your saddest memory?” —
that became ubiquitous in the mid-1990s. And the immediate progenitor
to “25 Random Things” isn’t hard to find: In 2006, bloggers were
challenging one another to list 100 random things about themselves on
their sites.
Jason Tanz, a senior editor at Wired, hypothesizes that bloggers who
were daunted by the challenge of writing 100 personal facts in one
sitting began breaking it down by fourths. Thus was born the “25 Random
Facts About Me” form, which for readers combines the voyeuristic appeal
of a blog with the creative surreality of a Mad Lib.
Mr. Tanz posited that the kind of information shared in “25 Random
Things” fills a void not satisfied by the constant onslaught of
uploaded photos and navel-gazing status updates.
“We’ve all had that awkward pause after we initially find an old
friend and exchange a few e-mails, and you don’t know what else to
say,” he said. “This is a socially acceptable way to tell people what
you’ve been up to without seeming totally obnoxious.”
Of course, as is inevitable with any runaway fad, a vocal resistance
has emerged. Some people pointedly refuse to participate, while others
express the view encapsulated by the old Fran Lebowitz line about how
spilling your guts is as attractive as it sounds.
Telisha Bryan, a deputy copy chief at a women’s magazine, used her
Facebook status update feature this week to broadcast her staunch
refusal to contribute to the oversharing.
“Whatever happened to talking to people face-to-face?” she wrote in
an e-mail message. “Since when do we have to give our friends synopses
or overviews of our lives? Anyone who wants to know 25 things about me
can call me or ask me.”
The idea that real intimacy is achieved by telling 25 people about
the first time you saw a horse or the name of your kindergarten
boyfriend is, admittedly, worthy of ridicule. But in her refusal to
participate, Ms. Bryan may have unwittingly touched upon the very thing
that makes the exercise so appealing: the fact that we can learn
intimate details of a person’s life without actually having to interact
with them.
“I’ve gotten 25 random things notices from people that absolutely
fascinated me,” said Mr. Beaver, the actor. “But I’m pretty certain I
wouldn’t want to be stuck on a bus with them telling me these things.”
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