3 - Jared, 19

For MicroBlogVember

I had to look up what this prompt was referencing.

Partly out of a deliberate effort to not engage with most social media (Cohost and Discord servers with close friends are exceptions) and partly due to my own failure to be Hip With The Kids, I don't recognize a lot of the Standard Internet Memes. My go-to question if someone says something I don't understand is "Is that a Vine? Maybe a TikTok?", and I say it with only 33.3% irony. Luckily, the answer is often yes.

There was some post a while back going around here that I can't be bothered to look up, but the base post was someone saying that when they were a child they swore to never be as out of touch as the adults were back then, but that the rise of TikTok meant that they resigned themselves to this perception of Oldness. Some follow up reply went into greater detail about how it's not anything necessarily about it being New that drives us away, but that TikTok inherently encourages the kind of shallow chaff which the endless content mill requires to keep running at its current speed, which makes it anathema to certain kinds of people.

I definitely feel out of touch sometimes though. I ask for the context behind jokes enough that it's genuinely annoyed people. Once I asked what the origin of an Internet Phrase was and someone in the chatroom had a minor mental breakdown because they thought I was upset with them.

Also, well, my understanding is that even as English slang changes over time, a disproportionately large amount of it comes from African American Vernacular English. I figure by the time it reaches my Asian-American eyes and ears, it's already been appropriated so hard that I'd feel kind of guilty using it, though language is mutable and I probably end up saying plenty of shit I shouldn't say as it is. We all do our best out here.