3 AM... IT’S TIME TO SHAKE THE WORLD UP

SPLENDOUR, POLITICS AND SCANDAL — IT’S BEEN A YEAR OF STAYING UP LATE TO DEVOUR NEWS ONLINE

Imagine this. You’re in bed. Maybe you’d been out for dinner with friends, come home late and now, you’re laying there waiting for sleep. Then, just as you were about to doze off, your phone vibrates (which, in any normal circumstance, you’d hardly hear but in this instance, sounds like someone operating a drill in your bedroom). You sit up, knowing that you only get notifications this late if it’s an emergency. Unlocking your phone, the light shines on your face (effectively obliterating any ember of sleep from your psyche) and you read a tweet on your newsfeed: Brad and Angelina announce divorce.

Despite the silence of the night, sirens are going off in your head as you reel back in shock. You know you should lay your head back down and try to get some sleep but somehow, your finger presses down to retweet and you’re now looking through the Brangelina hashtag. Next thing you know, it’s dawn and you haven’t slept a wink — but you’re also perfectly up to date on all the alleged reasons as to why yet another Hollywood power couple has disintegrated.

This year — more than any other — saw us tweet, retweet, share, like and create memes like never before. Politics, pop culture and gossip came together into a mishmash of Frankenstein-like proportions that had us absolutely obsessed with checking our social media platforms daily.

Kanye’s oversized ego

The Brangelina split wasn’t the only shocking thing we read in 140 characters this year. It’s been a year of serious scandal. Putting aside the sad and terrible deaths of many icons, actors, singers and athletes, there have been some seriously WTF moments in the Twitterverse.

Kanye West, what would we do without you? From his insane rants — that included asking Mark Zuckerberg for a loan — to telling us over and over again that he’s a genius, to his embarrassing public feud with Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose all live on Twitter, that’s right, LIVE. It felt like we were being sucked into a time-travelling vortex, re-witnessing a more detailed breakdown of Britney Spears in 2007, when she shaved her head and attacked that car with an umbrella.

You know what made me tweet at 3am? When Kanye had the audacity to allow his ego to grow so far out of his head (like Voldemort out of Professor Quirrell’s head in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) and announced that he was running for president in 2020. I’m pretty sure my tweet included around five ‘LOL’s. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t LOL. We LOL’d at Trump, didn’t we?

Which reminds me. The funniest tweets of this year have to be the absolute takedown of Melania Trump when she plagiarised Michelle Obama’s speech. If stacked up in a pile, the amount of memes that were created about Melania could give the Burj Khalifa a run for its money. I really believe that dictionaries should reassess their definition of the word plagiarism to include a photo of Melania Trump’s face. The Beyhive exploded on Twitter this year. Beyoncé’s super fans — who, if crossed should instil cold fear into the pit of your stomachs — went on a rampage online, not only at 3am but 24/7 for almost two weeks, trying to uncover the identity of the mysterious Becky. In one of the songs of her latest album Lemonade (I can’t remember the song because, at the risk of bringing on the wrath of the Beyhive, I actually have an aversion to Beyoncé), she alluded to husband Jay Z betraying her with “Becky, with the good hair”. Shockingly (well, not to me, because I don’t think the superstar has the ability to string a coherent sentence together), Beyoncé never cleared the accusation up or told her Beyhive to stop their witch-hunt, even when they bullied Ava Dash, the 16-yearold daughter of Rachel Roy, who was the frontrunner for the title of ‘Scarlet Woman of the Century’.

But the Twitterverse was truly owned by the youngest child of the most oversaturated family in the history of the world. From her extreme makeover from awkward ugly duckling to filler-filled, wig-wearing, makeup-applying, inappropriately-dressing, Bratz Doll-lookalike, Kylie Jenner has made 2016 her year to be overexposed. On a number of occasions, she broke the Internet — if not by her taste in scant and vulgar outfits, then by her physical transformation into every parent’s worst nightmare.

Why do we care? Why did we tweet about Kylie Jenner’s lip kit selling out across the country? Or Kim Kardashian outing Taylor Swift on World Snake Day or whether Hiddleswift was actually a fabrication for press purposes? Sigh. Let’s just put that down to another one of those unsolved mysteries — like why people around the world are obsessed with Nutella. Well, Nutella is chocolate spread… so I can completely understand why anyone would tweet about that at 3am. I do, all the time. Long live Nutella.

maan@khaleejtimes.com

Bratz Doll lookalike Kylie Jenner has made 2016 her year to be overexposed. On a number of occasions, she broke the Internet — if not by her taste in scant and vulgar outfits, then by her physical transformation into every parent’s worst nightmare