Often, when we engage with the internet, our focus will be snagged by the unreason, idiocy or impoliteness of strangers. People saying, doing or making things we find dull, irrelevant or even offensive. Autotuned videos of a guitarist accompanying a yowling cat. Deliberately disgusting recipes like the ones in which American moms bake Cheetos with spam and pasta in radioactive canned cheese sauce as a “hearty family meal” for hate-engagement.
Sometimes this negative relationship with online life encroaches upon offline life. As I sat in my local park with a cup of coffee last weekend, two teenage girls were filming a choreographed dance for TikTok. I watched them with a mild urge to scroll past this content which is clearly not for my demographic before realising that they were actual human girls in the world and not “content I’m not interested in”. My brain had briefly prompted me to “scroll past” living people. The boundary between life online and off is blurred.
This way of thinking is the basic operating procedure of a life lived partially, or largely, online. Few of us even defecate without a phone in our hand any more (the hygiene implications of this are worth googling). We have been chronically online for quite some time now but we’re still quite bad at being on the internet despite its ubiquity. We still get jealous when we look at retouched photos of influencers on holiday. We still answer the question we’d like someone to have asked instead of the one they did ask (Question: “Can I add dried sage to this gravy I’m making?” Answer: “My grandmother always added thyme, so you should add thyme.”) We are still willing to condemn people we don’t know based on a short video clip devoid of any context.
Australian skincare brand TBH made a video on TikTok that went unintentionally viral last month after some female employees took part in a trend that saw young women singing a one-line song describing their look in two characteristics. “Boots and a slick back bun” was one of the original videos inspiring the trend. Then there was “sambas and a little red bag”. When the TBH employees made their video, it was determined “cringe” for its enthusiasm and silliness, and the women involved were treated with incredible vitriol. A random joke in the comments describing them as the company’s HR employees preparing to conduct lay-offs was enough to cement a throwaway comment into fact, after which point people began contacting TBH to attempt to have the women fired for their callous inhumanity. All because they made a little video singing about their outfits. And being “cringe”.
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Most of us move through the world giving people the benefit of the doubt and simply ignoring the harmless behaviour of others when we find it annoying. After all, we understand that not everything other people do is either for or about us. Online, things are different. We lose that rational sense of our own irrelevance and we can become thoughtless, credulous babies, quicker to judge and rage and dismiss.
As the teenage girls made their dance video at the park and I drank my coffee and watched the birds busying their beaks into the soil, I made a mental note to reread Jean Baudrillard on hyperreality. He’s a useful read for all of us, from those rage-scrolling an endless Twitter thread interrogating whether Democrats should be more worried about Kamala Harris’s incoherent approach to economic policy, to intolerant adult women tutting at chronically-online but perfectly contented teenagers getting some exercise at the park.
Baudrillard was a French philosopher and sociologist who considered the ways in which technological advancement and immersion in media can distort our perception of reality. Or more accurately, how they blur the boundary between reality and simulation so that we constantly mistake the online world for an accurate or complete depiction of the world in general.
Online, we experience reality at a remove – what Baudrillard would describe as a representation. He claimed that we live now in “the desert of the real” which we constantly seek escape from, a bizarre cultural landscape in which we are more interested in the representations of things (like the way an influencer’s life appears online) than the reality of those things.
As we live inside the strange dissonance between the online world and the version of reality it reflects back to us, we become brittle, quick to forget the humanity of other people, and both overconfident and deeply insecure. The only way to mitigate it is to maintain awareness that we are captured by it. To be sceptical and decidedly not to treat others as representations to scroll past or dismiss. I head home and leave the girls to their dancing.