A Generation Reaching for Likes
“(The kids) are all put into this arena where you’re forced to try to survive on your own. They have to, like, do things in order to get people to like them. The game makers who this arena, just sit and watch them. But basically, they’re in there alone trying to survive.”
~ Ceili Lynch’s description of the Hunger Games tributes is actually an apt description of teen influencers like her
Review of Generation Like, episode of PBS documentary Frontline, 2014
The interactional approach to analyzing popular culture explores how the success of certain types of popular culture depends on the dynamics of social interaction among networks of people, essentially culture emerging from the bottom-up, as opposed to top-down by the media elites. This week we analyze the film ‘Generation Like’, a 2014 episode of PBS documentary Frontline, which delves into how the age-old teen quest for identity and validation has moved onto social media. Though slightly dated in the sense that the specific platforms that these phenomenon are taking place are now different (think TikTok becoming the predominant platform for sharing videos instead of YouTube), the underlying trends remain extremely relevant.
Social networks form over common interests, or what sociologists call social homophily. As we see in the film, these networks can meet in physical settings, such as Steven Fernandez and his skateboard-loving friends meeting in the skateparks of Compton, California, or virtually, such as Ceili Lynch and her fellow Hunger Games fanatics gathering and conversing on Twitter. With the advent of social media, social networks can move online, and the interaction approach has much greater significance. Individuals can interact with many more people than their social circle by publicly posting on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and many more platforms, and such user-generated content can be rapidly circulated across the Internet through validation mechanisms such as likes, retweets and shares, coupled with amplification mechanisms such as newsfeed, trending pages. Hence, users themselves decide which content becomes viral and which are buried and ignored. American sociologist Mark Granovetter observed that information diffuses across social networks the most effectively through weak ties. The Internet is hence the ultimate spreader of information, giving people up-to-date access to content shared by a huge number of weak ties in one’s life, and connecting people in multiple communities and social networks together. This leads to rapid dissemination of user-generated culture such as memes, jokes and Tiktok videos, which are often adapted in myriad ways to local contexts (just think of how many different memes have been generated from the same Super Bowl halftime show video of The Weeknd running through the labyrinth with the handheld camera, or from the picture of Bernie Sanders at Biden’s inauguration). Ultimately this leads to extremely rapid mixing of different cultures and the rapid cycles of social media content that we see today.
The underlying thesis of the film is that youth wannabe influencers are being consensually exploited by the culture and consumer industry for their word-of-mouth, showing how the interaction approach has been co-opted by the advertising industry for the profit motive. This shows that pop culture can hardly escape the clutches of capitalism.
Explicit word of mouth diffusion as well as implicit, passive influence have been found to be the most effective forms of marketing for consumer products. Hence, companies capitalize on attention-grabbing content produced by teen YouTube/Tiktok/(insert social media app) celebrity of the day by dangling the reward of some sponsored equipment and the sense of achievement of becoming an officially validated influencer. The episode gives two ready examples: skateboarder Steven Fernandez, who showed off his entire outfit being sponsored by companies like Primitive, Supra and DGK, and Daniela Diaz, who catapulted to fame after posting a cover video of the Cup song.
The thirst for online validation — the greed for the online currency of likes, makes them devote countless hours into generating their content. And with more and more of them being lured into this seemingly lucrative field, winning this zero-sum competition for attention means generating even more sensational and controversial content which often becomes far divorced from their original talents. The film showed that Steven started making more scandalous videos involving holding hands with random people and filming girls twerking, and other frankly cringeworthy videos such as a girl who stuck a condom into her nose and out of her mouth. Besides obviously risking their safety, this is a slippery slope of increasingly morally questionable behavior. (Sure enough, just two years after the documentary was released, Steven was accused of sexually exploiting an underage girl which resulted in him going into depression). Furthermore, becoming popular on social media may lead influencers to pander to cultural stereotypes, objectifying one’s own body by posting revealing pictures — something that Daniela Diaz does and even her mother endorses and supports, suggesting poses that ‘would get 150 likes’.
This shows the ever-increasing efforts and sacrifices they need to make to maintain the attention that sustains their corporate sponsorships and personal ego — a hedonistic treadmill where they exert themselves more and more just to stay in the same place. Furthermore, such teens inevitably tie their sense of self-worth to the online validation they get from online strangers — a modern, virtual form of Charles Horton Cooley’s social self where he posits that people build their self-image from the judgements and acknowledgement of others in society. However, the Internet rapidly moves on to the new fad — both programmatically (trending or hot pages by definition show new rapidly rising posts), and socially (people get bored of seeing the same style of meme or video), and the resultant sudden decline in fame and popularity has devastating psychological effects on these influencers — half of social media influencers report mental health struggles.
The end result is that firms essentially receive low-cost, yet organic word-of-mouth for their products, holy grail of marketing in a world where traditional TV ads are becoming less effective and more expensive by the day — and youth influencers are left with the risk and psychological trauma. The cruel twist is that teens are continually duped into thinking that being an influencer is worth it — they only see influencers at their highest points (when they are trending on TikTok or YouTube) and not after they’ve faded. They toil hard to earn the currency of likes (or in the Ceili’s case, Sparks), a currency which loses its value rapidly, while aiding corporations amass the actual dollars, dollars which actually last and hold economic sway in our capitalistic society. When the dust settles, the firms emerge unscathed and even enhanced by the organic marketing, while the kids and their fleeting moments of fame are swiftly forgotten (just googling the names of the teens featured in the film yields few results.
The film also talks about how teens are motivated by ‘fame by association’ — being mentioned or featured by celebrities, even through an online signal such as a retweet or follow. The Hunger Games fangirl Ceili talked about being ecstatic when the Official Hunger Games Twitter account retweeted her, as well as when Hunger Games actor Jack Quaid responded to her repeated tweet messages. Once again, the pop culture machinery is manipulating these desires. Firstly, by designing entire marketing campaigns around chances to be featured by celebrities on their montages or videos to incentivize loads of free word-of-mouth online chatter. More importantly, by choreographing celebrities’ online personas so mechanically and efficiently — through marketing agencies like theAudience and TVGla — such that what fans think are ‘authentic fan engagement’ and ‘validation from their idols’, are in reality, merely optimized and premeditated stunts done not by the actual celebrities but profit-motivated strategists.
Generation Like deftly closes by drawing the parallels between the Hunger Games the reality of social media. In a massively ironic scene, Ceili excitedly describes the invisible game-makers in The Hunger Games who manipulate the gameto get ‘higher ratings and more sponsors’, forcing kids to ‘go into the arena, survive on (their) own, (and) do things to get people to like them ‘, not knowing that she is precisely playing the role of the tributes she is describing.
