Every fall, a new slew of bookish, “dark academia,” trends seem to surface online. This September; however, invited the inception of a personal favorite of mine. The “Personal Curriculum” trend is not just your typical aesthetic trend or romanticization of fall, but a push back against the anti-intellectualism that is rampant in today’s age.
But what is anti-intellectualism and what does it have to do with a TikTok trend?
Anti-Intellectualism: What is It?
Anti-intellectualism is characterized as a mistrust or distaste towards intellectuals—intellectuals being people well-educated within their designated sphere; think professors, doctors, scientists, etc. The rampant rise anti-intellectualism can be contributed to many factors, but I’ll list just two here:
1. The Rise of Short-Form Media and Entertainment
TikTok, for all of the entertainment it brings, is often littered with misinformation. Your For You Page is designed to keep you hooked, not to keep you educated, after all. This often results in extreme polarization of viewpoints where users are fed only the things that appeal to them. If you agree with a certain perspective on a given topic, the formula of the app will continue spitting out videos that agree with you. And, since you are only seeing what you want to see, you become increasingly unlikely to question what you are seeing. People often feel a sense of trust towards the creators they follow, and tend to forget that those creators are self-serving; they will say whatever they need to appeal to an audience and retain viewers, not what is most true.
Additionally, the app interface itself makes it extremely hard to post links or sources, since it is designed to keep all engagement within TikTok. The algorithm suffers if you stray from the app in order to google or fact-check the things that you are seeing. So, the app makes it extremely difficult to link or redirect to any sources. This leads to an online cesspool wherein creators can say whatever they want and spread whatever half-truths and misinformation they please—audiences are extremely unlikely to choose to fact check their words, and will almost always either search for the topic on TikTok (which only feeds you the viewpoint you are likely to agree with) or just keep scrolling and passively agree with the information they are being fed.
2. “It’s Not that Deep” Culture
“It’s not that deep,” “the friend that’s too woke,” “the curtains were just blue,” “I ain’t reading allat:” all of these are common internet phrases that I can guarantee you have come across many times even just today. In online spaces, it is often seen as a sort of ‘gotcha’ moment to completely disregard deep thought. Nonchalance is prioritized, and it is seen as dramatic, or effeminate, or sensitive to be perceived as overly caring or thoughtful. This genuine contempt for content that requires you to think deeply and assess the things you are consuming is directly linked to both the falloff of media literacy and the rampant rise of anti-intellectual culture.
Now, what on Earth does all of this have to do with a TikTok trend? After all, I’ve spent the last several hundred words lambasting TikTok culture.
What is the personal curriculum trend?
The “Personal Fall Curriculum” trend is fairly simple: you take one or two of the hours you would usually spend doomscrolling online, or watching videos, and use them to learn about a subject that interests you. This subject can be anything! From art history to physics, there is a whole world of research and knowledge out there, and this new trend recontextualizes the pursuit of it into something fun and easily romanticized. There is no better weapon against anti-intellectualism, after all, than the pursuit of education!
This trend also is one of the few on the internet right now that prioritizes community over competition. A lot of internet trends get reduced quickly into a contest of who does it the best; the Fall Curriculum trend is all about growth and pursuit of passions—and few things bring people together quite like a shared ambition or passion for a subject. Not only are people designing their own personal curriculums, but they are posting and collecting recommendations from their online peers of different sources and books to study from. These books and sources do not have to be scholarly in nature, either. The whole point of this trend is just to put away the phone and the short-form media for a while in order to reconnect with the world around you. You can accomplish this by reading a scientific research paper, sure, but you can also do this by picking up a new hockey romance from your local library and spending a few hours parsing through it!
With that all aside, I’d like to share some of the things I have personally been delving into this Fall for my curriculum!
My Fall/Winter Curriculum
- Mythology: I have loved Greek and Roman myth ever since I was young, and this Fall/Winter I want to finally dive into Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey! I have been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses lately for a class and I cannot wait to read more mythology.
- Etymology: As an English major, I would be remiss not to mention my love of language and words. This Fall, I have been listening to and taking notes on a new podcast called Fredomology where the writer and literature student Frederick Atkinson has been going chronologically through the history of English Literature. There are only two episodes up so far, and I eagerly await the continuation.
- Art history: There is so much to be learned about different cultures through the way they practice art! I have spent much of the past few weeks amassing a collection of articles on JStor about the Parthenon. I highly recommend JStor for any subject that you are interested in learning more about!
All in all, this new trend is a fun way to explore new subjects outside of classroom constraints, as well as a fun new way of connecting with other people who share your passions! It is also never too late to start learning—I hope you all have a wonderful time pursuing your interests!
