Live, Love, Laugh: The decline of cringe and authenticity on social media

Posting” is now exclusively the domain of successful or aspirant content creators. The rest of us a spectators and consumers.

I have been seeing a lot of posts lately, mainly on TikTok, some on Instagram and others on the app owned by the South African Nazi about how cringey it has become to post on social media, particularly Instagram. “Posting” it seems is now exclusively the domain of successful or aspirant content creators. The rest of us a spectators and consumers.

Instagram is a content factory for “amateurs” to get 500 likes on a photo of their eggs benedict. It is a place for expert creators to get thousands and even millions of likes and shares of professionally shot photos from exotic islands and private plane seats paid for by advertisers hoping to somehow entice those of us struggling to get by to somehow want to fly First or Business Class on Qatar Airways or Emirates. These are no longer platforms in which you can post your breakfast and get 5 likes and call it a day. That is cringe.

The Social Media Beast

These are content creation platforms, beasts really for people and businesses who are content creators. Social media is a place to make monye, to gain popularity. This is no longer a safe space for you to be openly cringe-worthy. Particularly if you are a millenial.

We don’t even post our cats anymore, because there are cat content creators with 2 million likes on their recent post. You don’t post about that funny thing your dog did, becuase god forbid it does not get picked up by We Rate Dogs, the Daily Mail, LADBible or even get reposted by a micro-celebrity, or really any other vulture platform feeding off of the content of more creative and authentic people.

So a lot of us have stopped posting on social media, particularly Instagram. I’d never really thought about why I myself barely posted anything except occassionally on my Instagram stories, till I came across the videos of people talking about the fear of being cringey on social media and the resultant death of authentic posting. If its not on my stories, the people I want to interact with, i.e. my friends, will never see it. Instead it will drown in the feed of adverts; paid for posts by influencers; and aspirant influencers aura farming. All of it just content. And it is content. It is not photos, videos, carousels, quote posters, or memes- no it is material to be gawked at, sold and consumed. It is very different from the kind of photos, memes or videos people share organically.

Confession: I am a content creator and professional aspirant influencer

As someone who manages the social media accounts of the places I work for, I constantly think about what does and does not work for social media. I replicate models presented by successful creators. I am constantly on the prowl for trending sounds, memes, reels, and how to better harness them to improve the performance of the platforms I manage.

I work on an almost daily basis to try to find ways to influence people to care about war, climate change, corruption, authoritarianism, censorship, and democracy. It is not the kind of conventional influencer that people think of when they think of influencing. I’d perhaps be best described as a propagandist for social justice. But even this domain is dominated by the influencer, the content creator.

The leading voices of social change are not formalised non-profit spaces or experienced activists. They are influencer-activists with platforms, creators with an edge— the Hassan-Abi’s of the world.

Everyday, I work to make match-fact-based investigations to trending music and memes. I work to harness the talent of Gavin Newsome’s social media team, or that of the Duolingo team before they went AI-focussed.

In South Africa, I follow the voices of Zethu, Dan Corder, and Jaxx Amahle. To curate the news of the organisations I work for, I follow AJ Plus, Scroll Deep, the Middle East Eye, and Ash Sarker. These are the influencers who influence how I create for work. Yes, a lot of my work is organic, but a lot of it is also inspired by the fact that I am chronically online— gawking, consuming, and never posting.

You have to be extraordinary.

Having to constantly think about what makes something “good content” has essentially ruined the good fun I used to have being cringey online. I used to post my poems, my selfies, my exercise routines, even my long writing. Like this piece. It has been a while since I did something like this, just write, for five people to like and read it. We have stopped sharing the idiosyncratic moments of our lives, everything has to be extraordinarily poignant, riveting, funny and trendworthy. I have stopped, even before I knew why.

Social media has become about being extraordinary—extraordinarily being funny, extraordinarily crashing out, extraordinarily being liked, being heard and being extraordinarily being seen and worth seeing.

It is not just about living, loving, laughing. Oh the cringe!

It is sad. I guess this is why I am posting these photos of my okay photography, my photos curated to make me look cool and outdorsy. Because why not?

Not everything has to be spectacular— for it to have been life, love and laughter. It can just be.

We just have to be, we cannot keep feeding the beast that is social media unreality while continuing to yearn for authenticity.