Hey there,

My parents were too strict to let me have MySpace or Facebook, but I can still remember the days of looking over my older cousins’ and cooler friends’ shoulders as they updated their pages and clicked and scrolled around, giving me a tour of their little corner of the internet. Back in those days, everything was low-res, and the photo albums boasted dozens of photos for just a random hang with the crew. When I finally joined Instagram in 2013, a filter that made photos look sort of (not very convincingly) like they were shot on film was considered peak aesthetic. It was all extremely informal.

We have long been in an era in which carefully curated and edited content has reigned supreme, but the informality of early social media has been reincarnated in the form of yap sessions during ephemeral GRWM lives and videos of people quickly spouting off some thoughts as creators lie in bed in near-complete darkness. It is an interesting time to be on social media right now, especially TikTok, where your For You Page (FYP) can run the gamut from rough around the edges to polished, and anything in between.

One of my favorite content creators, Ena Da, once posted on her Instagram story about a theory she has about how the generations younger than millennials do not have the same view of virality. Millennials— casual and prolific as we were with our posts in the early days— were raised with the mantra and mentality that “Everything you put online stays there forever.” Gen Z, on the other hand, has grown up with the idea that you could get 15 seconds of fame this afternoon, and everyone will have forgotten your viral moment by dinnertime, so fast-paced and crowded are the platforms we spend our time scrolling. Though millennials’ attitude of casual-permanence is somewhat contradictory, I think the more recent ephemeral view of the internet has contributed to the informality we see trending today. 

Recently, I came across a TikTok that posited a trend prediction: that audiences are moving away from “FYP” emphasis in content consumption, and back toward online communities in social media engagement. This creator cites the rise of newsletter-blogs (like this one, hi!) and the use of platforms like Discord to back this claim. 

In my own content creation, the target audience is my guiding star. I always think about who I want to reach with my words, my videos, and my message, and create accordingly. More formal, even scripted short-form videos can attract a different viewer (and different engagement) than an informal TikTok shot on the selfie camera on impulse. Though off the cuff, the latter can still be a valuable part of an overall strategy— those videos do tend to have a special kind of energy that comes from being created spur-of-the-moment.

There is something freeing in knowing that audiences don’t always expect content to be “perfect.” It gives me hope that, behind all the scrolling, what we all really want is still human connection.