Has “cringe ” become a culture of its own?
Or how to contribute to online hypocrisy.
Internet culture has raised a new generation of online users whose imagination has been filled with odd digital pieces. I am part of this generation. I am part of those who spent countless hours binge-watching high-quality Youtube content, part of those who painfully commented distorted images of pop culture on obscure online communities, to feel some sense of intellectual reward.
Yes, I’m referring to memes.
It has now become difficult to avoid them when roaming the virtual world and any other form of media. This digital era has created new cultural references through various platforms like the regrettable Vines or Instagram.
The fact is that this snippet of the internet has entered the pop culture scene, by imposing new phrases, new behaviors and therefore new ideals. Yes, ideals. Young Millenials aspired to become Britney Spears copycats whereas young Zeners look up to “aesthetic” royalty and Californian VSCO ingenue. Yes, VSCO girls.
And it is, indeed, what we could consider “cringeworthy”. And it highly contributes to internet royalty.
This particular genre stands out from the contagious meme scene. It’s outrageoulsy blooming. The amount of online cringeworthy content is representative of the overexposure imposed by social media and its users. No one can truly escape it, not even “mainstream media”. For a fact, it originated from it: TV hosts fighting on live television, compromising pictures, oversharing newspaper articles… They have overflown the entertainment market, making us greedy for some public embarassment. As if we craved a form of awkardness and distate. But we are contributors, not consummers of “cringe”. There is comfort in others’ misadventures, especially if the “others” are public figures. However, the internet has proved us wrong through memes: everyone and everything has meme potential.
No, we haven’t become more cringeworthy.
Cringe works like a questionable joke thrown into a conversation: less likely to land off, but more likely to make you stand out. What is niche is rare and as a result, intriguing. There’s, in fact, an appeal to weirdness. It shows vulnerability and uniqueness, a paramount part of what makes something “cringe” or not.
But to what extent does it differ from meme culture?
Artistic expression requires time and craft. Like any other actor in pop culture, the success of a meme is unpredictable and sporadic. But why “cringe” content isn’t? Why is it systematically successful? Because distate does not include comedy in the first place. We have claimed cringy videos to be funny because we distanced ourselves from it in the first place. Because it’s easier to escape uneasiness through humor. It’s a coping mechanism, like self-deprecating humor. We normalize “cringe” and therefore give it its own space as a genre of its own.
And it works. What’s regarded as “cringe” contributes to a mainstream transmission of obscure internet culture. There, it comes full circle. Questionable comedy is no longer anecdotal, especially when the mainstream scene finds a commercial potential to it. Yes, memes with a tasteful dose of cringe can be bankable.
What first appeared to the public eye as a sick joke from nerdy Millenials and Gen zers has drawn the attention of mainstream audiences and media. Because, when there’s “niche”, there’s a community of followers and therefore, a potential market. And this one is booming.
Do you remember that VSCO girl mentioned earlier? Her frantic imitations of internet sensations and obsessive need to own an excessive amount of ecofriendly scrunchies are no longer limited to a mood board. The bitch is making money now. Fashion giants and Instagram’s algorithms know it way too well. The latest example: Vans sales number grew up to 25% in 2019 after the breakthrough of the TikTok muppet, according to data from the NPD Group.
I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that memes have remained part of a subculture when such exposure is displayed. Meme and cringe culture have become undeniable actors of “mainstream” culture. The line between niche and mainstream now seems blurred: can meme culture remain exclusive to online communities?
Yes, we’re part of the cringe. We’ve always been.
There will always be creators, new materials and foremost awkward users trapped in compromising situations. Cringe was never a reinvention of grotesque humor, nor a niche culture. Its layers have always been exposed to various audiences because we enabled it massively. This so called elitism demonstrates that we are still having a hard time with online hypocrisy, instead of embracing the singularity of the online world. Cringe fuels meme culture, and its impact is yet to be determined.