Take a moment and check what is trending on your Facebook. If your experience is like mine, you will see that Apple has released a gold laptop, Ryan Gosling was still adorable at 12 years old, and that SAE boys at University of Oklahoma are suspended.
But what about the real news?
Sitting in a rented beach house with minimal ties to society, it occurred to me that in order to find out what is happening in the political ring, or the updated news on societal happenings, one must pay to subscribe to a news outlet. More so, why aren't these major news occurrences the trends on our social media accounts?
That's when it clicked: we are the trendsetters.
What pops up as news on our Facebooks are the things that people choose to talk about in their posts. On Twitter, it is the words we chose to hashtag and repost. On Tumblr, it is the photographs we reblog.
We, the Millennials, have the potential to control what may or may not be the next biggest thing, but yet we always seem to choose the next greatest piece of technology. The sad part is that we could control so much more. We have the power to unofficially promote any presidential candidate, control the next big national issue, and even dictate what the needs of our society are. The power is in our hands to make this nation the “next big thing," rather than just our material possessions.
What if we decided to make national change our next Twitter trend? What if we made violence on college campuses the next top trend? What if national awareness days, like International Women's Day, dominated every social media outlet used? How can we control what is and is not trending news?
Let's focus on what makes a top trend so prominent. The importance is frankly irrelevant, as trends come from what users choose to talk about on social media outlets. So let's start talking about what is truly important to us, which I'm sure is not Apple's latest gadget nor Victoria's Secret's latest sale, despite how cute their bikinis are.
The point of the story is that we control the media by what we mention in our social media posts, so let's talk about what actually matters and what we want as news, whether it be a pattern of campus rape, racial slurs, or simply the parking crisis we as students face every day.
