Cringe
The Feels Guide is a field guide to internet emotion — new feelings, moody machines, emotional design, and wherever, whenever, however emotion and technology mix and mingle.
This week’s feeling quickly changed from an empathy-builder to an empathy-detractor as it went mainstream, but the next phase of cringe may be kinder.
🔑 DEFINITION
The secondhand embarrassment from watching someone else’s awkward moment.
See also: cringey, public shaming, problematic fave, epic fail, roasting, cheugy
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Cringe took off in forums in the early 2000s, when the practice of humiliating oneself online was still somewhat novel. Since 2004, Google searches for the term have been steadily increasing. In 2006, a now-beloved clip known as Star Wars Kid (later commemorated in cringe comedy Arrested Development) was uploaded to YouTube. In 2007, the first entry for cringeworthy appeared in Urban Dictionary. The Reddit forum r/cringe originated with a local TV news segment on self-styled “teen werewolves” in 2009, the same year that cringeworthy.net was launched. By 2010, cringe was everywhere.
As cringe culture was blowing up online, the entertainment industry embraced cringe comedy, a genre grounded in social awkwardness with a dose of guilty pleasure. The Larry Sanders Show or America’s Funniest Home Videos were early examples, but it didn’t really take off until the 2000s. There were mockumentary-style comedies like The Office, where reactions to the idiotic comments of Michael Scott induced uncomfortable laughs. And there were pseudo-reality shows like Da Ali G show, where inappropriate questions posed to unsuspecting celebrities were cringe with a splash of schadenfreude. The genre lives on in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where viewers cringe at Larry David’s social faux pas, and, Nathan for You, where preposterous business schemes capture a similar plane of unease.
From the early days, calling out questionable fashion choices, oversharing, and uncomfortable come-ons also led to cyberbullying. The subjects of viral cringey TikToks are often people without the privilege of beauty, wealth, or in-depth knowledge of internet norms. They likely never meant for thousands of people to comment on a disability, an unusual hobby, or a less-than-perfect house. Occasionally though, the subject of cringe becomes an alternative icon, like Australian creator @superchloeone who has since become a strong spokesperson for people with bipolar disorder.
By 2021, worldwide Google searches for cringe were at an all-time high, r/cringe boasted over 1.3 million members, and the word was chosen as teen youth word of the year (edging out sus). There are different variations, but it’s now internet mainstream.
💬 EXPRESSION
Early cringe culture was about secondhand embarrassment on behalf of friends and family like when you get a superstitious email chain from your mom. It could also be self-deprecating, wincing at your own awkward behavior when you double tap an old picture in the middle of a deep dive on someone’s Instagram. Cringe, at its best, is gently poking fun at forgivable human flaws.
As it’s become more widespread, cringe has shifted to identifying the awkward moments of strangers. In its milder form, it’s something like “I think I speak for all of us, when I say, yikes” over a cronut or skinny jeans. When it calls out fanboys or furries, cosplayers or goths, comments can be cruel though. At its worst, cringe ostracizes people, implicitly indicating insiders and outsiders.
💗 EXPERIENCE
The dictionary definition of cringe is a physical response to an uncomfortable expectation — to shrink, cower, flinch, or contract. Online, cringe was originally watched through fanned fingers, where it felt impossible to look and impossible to look away. It could bring on a queasy lurch in the pit of the stomach or clenched hands while waiting for an anticipated cringe moment.
The visceral response to cringe has been muted by the genre’s gradual mainstreaming through cringe comedy, meme generators, and TikTok compilations on YouTube. Because of this reflexive awareness, it’s easy to identify but more difficult to really feel.
Early cringe evoked empathy through a recognition that “oh, I could totally see myself doing that”. And it often left behind a sense of relief, feeling grateful that it wasn’t you even if it easily could have been.
Just as the visceral response changed with its ubiquity, so too has the empathy response. Rather than making you wince in recognition and shared pain, cringe now comes at the secondhand embarrassment that stems from a lack of self-awareness. After a decade of watching cringe, it’s can be cringey when someone doesn’t understand how they’re coming across.
❝ QUOTE
“My favorite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic — that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.” Taika Waititi
💡 BIG PICTURE
Awkwardness has an upside. It can foster a sense of shared humanity. Because it can reveal that gap between who we think we really are and what the world is seeing, it can help us to be a bit kinder to ourselves and to others.
Currently, the most popular cringe is parody, where the genre functions like a dose of exposure therapy where we are drawn to our deepest fears. Posts about what a cringey person might do invite people to laugh at an imagined person rather than a real one. And that may be at the root of it’s popularity — the human impulse to understand how we fit in and how we can stand out.
🤔 LEARN MORE
- Read one of the original takes on TikTok and cringe culture by Taylor Lorenz
- Here’s a collection of classically hot influencers making fools of themselves by Leia Jospé, the “Curator of Cringe”
- Listen to stories that make us Cringe on This American Life
- Read Melissa Dahl’s book, Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, for a deep dive on the cringe culture of the internet
( >︹<)
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗
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The guide behind the guide
I’m Pamela Pavliscak, a tech emotionographer who studies emotion on the internet. I’m writing a book, All the Feels (Algonquin, 2024), about how technology is changing our emotional life — mostly for the better. I run an emotion tech consultancy called Subjective Labs and teach emotional design at the Pratt Institute in NYC. And I’m starting to share what I learn here and on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter.
