In the span of about a decade, social media has completely changed the landscape of communication by connecting us to people from all over the world. Nowadays, everyone can have their own platform and a modicum of fame. This in itself isn’t bad, but it becomes a problem when that modicum of fame goes to people’s heads, making them think the lives of others revolve around them. We’ve all seen it before: you post or comment about something you like, only for someone else to jump in and say that they hate it (or vice-versa), so you should too, as if their view is the objectively correct one to have.
A recent example of this comes from a controversy surrounding popular singer-songwriter Sombr. A TikTok user known as Meg released a video discussing her experience at one of his concerts, in which the 20-year-old performer told sexually explicit stories onstage and asked his audience (which included a fair amount of underage concert-goers) to “bark” for him.
Meg explained that the show was not for her and recommended other adult fans of Sombr to “stick to Spotify” and avoid spending money to attend his live shows due to their uncomfortable nature. Despite being labeled as a warning to other adults, Meg’s video was bombarded by apoplectic responses from the singer’s younger fans, saying that they had a good time and thought his onstage antics were funny, so that made Meg’s opinion “invalid.”
This is far from the first example of this kind of behavior. Aggressive responses to a difference in opinion can be seen in every online community, from music to video games to books and television. It can even go further than just petty bickering, extending to doxxing and even death threats. All because someone did or didn’t personally connect with something.
While being able to express our opinions online and find others like us is one of the benefits of social media, people tend to forget it goes both ways. There are others out there who simply won’t share your interests. It’s not a personal attack, but that doesn’t stop people from treating it like one, especially when they’ve absorbed those interests heavily into their own identity. It’s no coincidence that social media is a breeding ground for parasocial relationships; a phenomenon where one party is far more invested in a superficial or even nonexistent relationship than the other. No matter how relatable or unrelatable something may seem online, it’s important to remember that the internet is an impersonal space. By and large, the people you interact with do not personally know you. Nothing is created specifically for you, nor targeted specifically at you.
Even when we’re having fun connecting with others online, let’s remember to take a step back and stay grounded. Nobody is the center of anyone else’s universe, and we shouldn’t take impersonal online content personally, either in a positive or negative sense. Like Meg, we should all learn to evaluate the content we come across more carefully so we can know when to say to ourselves, “This isn’t for me.”