I'm the one who had your baby's eyes.

 I remain mystified by the modern world and by the culture we have built around ourselves. 

Remember me...

There is a thing called BoredPanda. I guess its a sort of on-line magazine, but I no longer know whether people think in terms of magazines. Its like a chatty round-robin, full of the wacky world of social media. Nicking bits off the internet and publishing it as if it were an authored article is a kind of journalism, I suppose. This particular story concerned an American woman who had been living in Birmingham (the Midlands, not Alabama) and was posting a number of tweets about how strange English culture is. It was pretty charming stuff if not quite on the level - she was clearly feeding back to an American audience the sort of things they expected to hear about the "Brits" (meaning "The English"): we are reserved, we are polite, we are obsessed with tea etc. We aren't like that at all. We're a nation of angry and aggressive binge drinkers, but Americans are still in love with the idea that the English are buttoned down tweed botherers with bad teeth. I mean I am, but I'm hardly representative. 

So the tweets were things about tea and beans on toast and queing and talking about the weather. Fine. They're pithy, they're self contained. Its observational comedy and every bit as dull as that. What I find fascinating is the formatting, and the formatting is identical on all these pages: the tweet, an unnecessary and stolid explanation of the content of the tweet, and then comments from the public. I don't know why this very precise ordering of events is repeated endlessly all over the internet but it is. This is how you do clickbait in 2021:  

Tweeter: "British people say "You alright?" instead of "hello". What's all that about? Do I look unwell?"

BoredPanda: "This is kinda crazy but true. In the idiomatic language of the Britishers, they enquire after your health as a sort of greeting. This is purely meant as a pleasantry - they don't require a list of your recent ailments. lol. No, they are simply saying hello."

Member of Public: "I say hello when I meet people and so do all Brits. No one has ever asked "How I am". I wouldn't even know how to answer that question."

This pattern is repeated endlessly across countless pages. I find it fascinating in the same way I enjoy building a psychological profile of someone from their Amazon reviews. Which obviously I would never do - I'm not insane ha ha ha ha. Who is the explanitary paragraph for? Do BoredPanda really not trust their readers to understand what the tweet was about? Or is this the only chance the BoredPanda journalist actually gets to do some writing?

The real thrill though is the public. Their persistance in commenting on everything, even if they have nothing to say, or they haven't given the matter any thought, or they can't spell or type, is a triumph of the human spirit. I am reminded of a caveman spitting pigment at his hand pressed against the cave wall, thinking "I was here - remember me". Everytime someone wades into an online conversation they haven't bothered to read, or funeral crashes an obituary with "never heard of them lol", or mansplains something obvious that someone else has already clearly delineated, they are saying "I was here - remember me". It is a primal imperative, the need to be known, to stand apart, to have a voice and be recognised for that voice. And here I am writing a blog. I am finishing an overlong entry about the irksomeness of some niche irritation. I am checking the punctuation and finessing the typos. I am pressing the "publish" button. I was here - remember me.