The Hit ListWhat's behind the '25 Random Things About Me' phenomenon?By Don Aucoin
Globe Staff
February 7, 2009
Deirdre Carey of Franklin was on her Facebook page last Saturday when she got "tagged," or notified, that a friend was passing along a list called "25 Random Things About Me."
The friend asked Carey to come up with her own "25 Random Things" and send it to 25 Facebook friends. Intrigued, Carey did so. Her list ranged from the quirky - for instance, that she once got a sandcrab stuck in her ear on a beach in Aruba and had to be rushed to a hospital to have it removed - to the deeply personal, like the fact that her young son survived a bout with brain cancer.
By midweek, the 41-year-old Carey had received lists of "25 Random Things" from 20 of the 25 Facebook friends she had sent her list to. She was officially part of both the newest viral Web phenomenon and the latest stage in the evolution of social media. "It's spreading like wildfire," enthused Carey.....
...Thanks to this multiplier effect - 25-by-25 to infinity and beyond - an awful lot of random things have been whizzing around the Web, ranging from heartfelt to mundane to just plain weird.
Kevin Flynn of Hopkinton, N.H., got one in the latter category. He received a list from a friend who claimed to have once had sex in a cemetery. "I didn't need to know that, dude," groaned Flynn, 38. "Our relationship could have been just fine for years and years without knowing that fact." A big part of the problem, in Flynn's view, is the number that defines the phenomenon. "There's probably not 25 really interesting facts about anybody," he said. "You could get 12 really good ones, and then you start hitting the bottom of the barrel."
Read the rest and the comments @
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2009/02/07/the_hit_list/?page=full#commentAnchorinformation overload?
"There's probably not 25 really interesting facts about anybody," he said. "You could get 12 really good ones, and then you start hitting the bottom of the barrel."
