The FOMO Counter-culture
Anti-trend meme culture tries to defy the mainstream. But does it really?
If you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’d have definitely seen this image in some context of any newly trending thing. The popular syntax of this meme template is that you take a newly trending topic and give it on the speech bubble for Robin, while Batman’s speech bubble says that it’s too much already. One of the latest being, this one below.
As Wikipedia explains, in social dynamics, critical mass is a sufficient number of adopters of an innovation in a social system so that the rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining and creates further growth.
This holds true in case of any particular online trend where once people start following it, more people follow it and it becomes self sustaining and creates further growth in popularity of that particular activity.
FOMO
With the advent of social media, fear-of-missing-out has become a strong driver of actions. FOMO in short, defined as the anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, which is often aroused by posts seen on social media.
Once any activity becomes popular, this FOMO is triggered which targets the human sense of belonging making others interact and act out the same way in order to make a new ‘trend’ successful.
Triggering this sense of belonging has its positive as well as negative effects. From some great examples of communities coming together to help someone in need, to absolutely dangerous outcomes from brainwashing of huge populace. For the topic of discussion here, I’ll limit it to the one with respect to the current state of social media and the memes.
Thus, when you see something new trending among your social circles through social media, you do feel that FOMO and want to be a part of it as well. Case in point here, being a recent example, like the Dalgona Coffee.
A harmless trend of making instant coffee in a specific way, simple to make, and looks visually pleasing, is something that has started trending in the recent days. With a lot of people sitting at home in the times of the virus across the world, this caught up and there’s been lot of posts, videos, memes, regarding this trend. (So much, so that I am writing a post here just to include some trending words and hoping that it’d get some readers)
Counter-FOMO
Once a trend has started and as more people start joining this brigade, there comes the part where you start seeing the ‘enough of this’ kind of posts.
These are the ‘hipsters’ of that trend, with a sense of self proclaimed highbrow-ness. While this seems like a hot take on things which is outside the mainstream, and more unique, it isn’t really.
If you look at any popular trend, there is huge mass of people not buying into that trend. Also more often than not, this mass of ‘non-engaged’ audience, is definitely higher than the engaged ones.
So, while lot of people are seeing and engaging with the trend of the coffee posts, there is a bigger audience out there who are
- Feeling left out because maybe now they feel are too late to the party, OR
- Feeling that they’re too cool for this stupid trend to be a part of it themselves.
This apparent FOMO-lessness, just like the real one, triggers the exact same belongingness to make you engage with the content that makes fun of the trending content.
This means, that while engaging with content which defies the current social media trends seems very edgy and hipster-y, it is the most mainstream thing that you could be doing.
In the world of making content that has to seem relatable to your audience, this counter-FOMO kind of content is the one that’d engage and relate to a higher number of people than going with the trend. And who better to understand this than the popular brands.
Riding on this Dalgona Coffee trend bandwagon, here’s a couple of fun posts which capture this audience.
Democratization of FOMO
As Tim Wu points out in his book, The Attention Merchants, the way we go about our lives now is a result of the work of ‘attention merchants’. The way advertising and commerce has changed our world over the past century has bought us here, to this point where we have to acknowledge the fact that our attention is an expensive commodity which has turned cheap in the current times.
Making right use of the tools to acquire this attention, the attention merchants have affected the world ranging from the war propaganda, to your Instagram stories.
Over time, the resources required for acquiring attention, and in turn, targeting your FOMO, have become cheaper and extremely accessible. With the internet and social media being so prevalent, it is very much possible for any person with enough resources to reach the critical mass. While it was only the high budget advertisements that had the power to trigger this FOMO earlier, now this power, technically, lies with every individual.
With this availability at everyone’s finger tips, the number of trends that can be made out of anything are limitless. TikTok being a big example of this recently where various challenges take place regularly and everyone feels a part of the community by engaging in them.
More opportunities for the trends which try to grab your attention, also mean that there are more rebellion opportunities against every trend which can also be equally appealing. Just the way it was the 1960s which were the rebellious times against the consumer culture of the 1950s, we have a new consumer culture every other day, and a rebelling counterculture on the next day.
During the rebellious 60, it was Pepsi, who used this opportunity to close the gap with its rival Coca Cola by going for more of a soft sell and advertising the image of the consumer instead of the hard selling advertisements which used to be frequent before. (You could read more about this in the book mentioned earlier)
Just the way this counterculture gave an opportunity for someone to go against the flow of how things used to be done, there’s always an opportunity to influence those not involved in the trends as well. Only difference is that it took years for this opportunity to arise in the past, while today it is available every other day.
Moral of the story
We’re all in the same boat. Either you follow any trend, or detest it, as long as your feelings triggered are strong enough to engage with any of the content, for, or against it, remember it is the same desire that is making you do it.
TL;DR
- Internet trends reach a huge mass of people and get popular really fast — example, Dalgona Coffee.
- Once people start engaging with the trend, there is also another kind of people who start engaging with content which makes fun of the trend, or rebels against it, so to speak.
- While the ones engaging with the trend in the first place can be said to be doing out of FOMO, the ones who choose to stay away but engage with the other side of the content are also being triggered by the same basic human needs like the former group of people.
- The hipster, rebellious, anti-trend meme culture is very much mainstream even if you’d like to think otherwise.
