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"#AlexFromTarget" trend distracts from important issues

November 4, 2014

For those of you who are not familiar with the hashtag, Alex, whose last name is currently unknown, is an average teenager who works at Target. During one of Alex’s shifts, someone decided to take a picture of him and, in a few seconds, “Alex from Target” was a new phenomenon. His talent? Just being cute to some people and being able to make it onto everyone’s timeline via retweet.

You might say I’m a “hater,” and so be it. But when we feed into this brand of craziness, we are taking focus away from so many things as a society. I swear I’ve seen more tweets about Alex from the people of my generation than about the Ebola cases in the United States of America or even in other parts of the world. Way to go, peeps!

When these things happen, I start to question myself, about the role I play and importance of social media in our society. I mean, are we using social media just to promote a nobody? Sorry if I hurt someone’s feelings. Alex is not the first random kid to rise to fame just for his looks via social media. Sadly, he will not be the last one, either.

This whole thing infuriates me, because there are so many important things that we as a generation should be paying attention to. Instead, the majority of our generation is filling followers’ timelines with a young boy who has an innocent Justin Bieber look.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against the guy who now has thousands of followers on Twitter and might think he is this generation’s “dandy,” a man obsessed with his appearance.

I have something against the people who keep tweeting about him. I’m afraid my generation is becoming more superficial than ever. While you are tweeting about how Alex from Target is putting your fruits in some plastic bags, there are one thousand problems that are much more important and that need to be in the spotlight, in everybody else’s timelines.

I wish the best of luck to Alex from Target, although many of you will think he has a lot of luck for having thousands of followers and being what society thinks is handsome, pretty or cute. And I wish good luck to my generation, too.

I hope we can move from a generation that uses Twitter or other social media networks to talk about trashy nonsense into a generation that really cares about inequalities in the United States of America or candidates running for the different governmental positions.

I know we can’t save the world with a retweet, but we can definitely stop spreading stupidity around Twitter. Alex from Target, I hope you can understand that you haven’t achieved anything in life with just being good looking.

Sergio is a reporter working with The State News. Reach him at sergio.martinez@statenews.com.

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