How to deal with the feeling of too many “trends”

There’s an opinion that is becoming dominant in the world of “trends” that thanks to the Internet there are too many trends happening too quickly for anyone to keep up with, that the word itself is becoming meaningless as a result. I’ve been working in Internet trends for over 15 years and couldn’t be more opposed to this perspective. The issue here lies neither with the trends nor with the internet but with the observer.

For the purposes of this post, we will consider trends to be the collective creations, conversations, characters, and communities that occupy our attention online. The last part of this definition –our attention online — is probably most important because the real shift in trends is coming from our own awareness of trends.

Our algorithmically-mediated Internet lives make visible to us things we might not have sought out in a pre-algorithmic media era. Platform algorithms, seeking to maximize personal and cultural relevance, push more things from the margins, exposing us to the interests, conversations, and content being generated from within subcommunities. It’s not, then, that those trends would never existed — it’s just that you are more likely to see them now without necessarily having been a part of the community. Because most of us have experienced the evolution of the Internet from being a search-driven experience to an algorithmically-mediated experience, we feel this shift, and it can feel overwhelming. The next generation, however, will never have known another model, and this will be normal.

In the physical world, you encounter just as many trends as you do in the digital world, but you’ve learned to compartmentalize and discriminate between which things you need to be most aware of. For example, you encounter the following types trends on a daily basis, and you decide the extent to which you need to engage with them:

Slang – the informal language we use to communicate informally within our personally relevant communities.

Lifestyle trends — the way we design our everyday lives to reflect our personal tastes, informed by cultural shifts in fashion, home decor, fitness, and foods.

Current events — Political and social moments receiving public attention that have a meaningful impact on the world around you.

Celebrity — people receiving public attention, usually related to entertainment

Entertainment— Shifts in tastes in popular media, including popular TV, Movies, Music, and Video Games.

Because these trends are not always equally relevant to you at any given moment, you dial your awareness and consideration of these trends up and down as needed. Think about many of this year’s online “trends” and how they fit into these categories.

“Very mindful, very demure.” This catch phrase is slang. It’s a fleeting, in-joke that communicates a point-of-view and an awareness of

Who TF Did I Marry – This 50-part series is an entertainment trend, no different from a popular

Fridgescaping – This emergent hobby of thematically designing the inside of one’s refrigerator is a lifestyle trend.

Hawk Tuah Girl – Hawk Tuah Girl is a celebrity, her ongoing adventures have become current events, and her podcast is entertainment.

It’s possible to categorize trends like this, but I will acknowledge that the Internet complicates this. It flattens all of those categories because we experience them all the same way, as content. Because of that, it can feel as though you need to be aware of all of these things, that all of these fit into the Entertainment category and require your awareness in order to be able to understand other entertainment. I think the key is in embracing the Internet as being a part of the real world, a place we live rather than a place we consume, which will help you see all of these things as more than just discourse and entertainment.

There is a question of cultural literacy to contend with.

If I am saying that the Internet is a place we inhabit, and a place has its own set of communities, cultures, and norms, then being fluent in those things would seem to be required in order for one to be culturally literate, but there’s another real world analog to consider. You don’t have to be familiar with all of the world’s cultures in order to be considered culturally literate. You only need to be literate in personally relevant communities — your neighborhood, your work/school, your fandom. The same is true online. You only really need to be aware of those things that matter to your online communities.

Finally, though, there are the people like me who work in trends. We make it our jobs to be aware of what’s happening online, and we’re probably the ones who feel, most acutely, the sense of being overwhelmed by the volume of trends. That, also, is the result of a lack of discrimination. We should be asking ourselves which kinds of trends are most useful to us and why.

I’m not a social media manager, so I don’t feel the need to be fluent in the latest slang. I ignore it. You might think that because I study YouTube trends, I would care about each new short-form food or dance trend that comes along. The truth is I don’t! I care more that the fact that these things exist as categories of content, and I treat the ephemeral variations within the category as just that — ephemera. That allows me to put proper weight on the right things, and that helps me avoid the feeling that I need to track everything. By being disciplined in understanding what I care about, it helps me focus my attention where it needs to be.

I’m really interested in what others who have to work with trends think about this. Please leave a comment if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the proliferation of internet trends. Let me know how you deal with it and what you think about my approach.