Is A War Really A War If It Isn’t Trending Online?
IT is a question that has plagued philosophers and meme generating websites for centuries, is the immeasurable suffering experienced by innocent civilians in a war torn region happening at all if it is failing to trend online?
“If a refugee from Eritrea, a country I imagine you know very little about, could maybe dress up as a Pokémon in a blue/gold dress while carrying a gorilla on his shoulders, there’s every chance that when he’s murdered he could trend on Twitter for several hours. This is the sort of thinking outside the box that is needed, and sadly, people ignore our advice,” head of gif procurement at Buzzfeed, Alyssa Morton told WWN.
Can conflict, complete with bombs and bullets piercing flesh, making orphans of children, widows and widowers of women and men be considered to be happening if the opposing sides have yet to be boiled down into a fun list complete with gifs of cats, Kanye West and children falling off trampolines.
“The simple answer is no,” lecturer in philosophy at Harvard University, Timothy Schlubmann explains to WWN, “conflicts in Yemen, Darfur, Eritrea, Ukraine and elsewhere can’t really claim to be wars until they launch a ‘ridiculously good looking corpse’ meme”.
It was at this point we began trailing off and took to out phones to look at the latest Hey Arthur meme doing the rounds. However, frustratingly, the lecturer continued to speak.
“Existence is conditional, conditional to being of consequence, of ascertaining tangible meaning. Being shared in dialogues and this is where Sudan fails and cat gifs succeed. I’m not condoning the cat gif-tification of the conflict in Yemen, but if you want to exist at all and be acknowledged ya gotta up your meme game,” Schlubmann cautioned.
Questions still remain on what war ravaged areas can learn from World War II and Vietnam among other wars, which managed to gain the public’s attention without ever trending online.
“Lists are hilarious, memes are hilarious and civilians taking cover from renewed air assaults need to be aware of this when creating content on Snapchat,” Morgan added, speaking our language.
“The failure of wars ongoing in Syria and elsewhere to ‘break the internet’ as a number of pointless and utterly meritless other tripe did this year, on a philosophical level at least, means it quite literally didn’t happen,” Schlubmann added.
We then asked if Schlubmann could help find the nearest Pokestop. He declined.
“It is regrettable that Syrian refugees are using loom bands to try to gain traction online. Loom bands were last year’s big disposable trend, they’re seriously off message and it’s little surprise my Facebook feed is lacking in shareable Syrian content,” Schlubmann lamented.