Performatism and performance

Spotting the difference between what's trending and what's really a trend is becoming harder and harder.

This time, three years ago, I was ending six weeks of paternity leave, and Teneo was preparing for its post-lockdown RTO - return to the office. It was a big deal, with months of planning, changes to the office layout and a boat party to celebrate. What was striking about that “return to the office” was how easily everyone slipped back into their old routines.

During the 18 months when COVID and the associated lockdowns were at their most intense, many people wrote articles featuring some BOLD predictions and HOT takes. The office as we knew it was dead; recruitment would be revolutionised as companies hired more remote workers, removing geographical restrictions; events would go entirely online, and no one would ever pay exorbitant flight and hotel costs again.

Like so much of the COVID era, those predictions feel like the products of some particularly vivid fever dream. As I write this on a packed rush-hour train, where a single person wears a mask, it’s striking how little has changed from those innocent pre-pandemic days.

Outside of accepting hybrid working for office-based employees, it strikes me that the most significant differences caused by the pandemic are more subtle and more challenging to spot. Younger people certainly appear to feel the lingering effects of lockdown more acutely than most, particularly those whose education was interrupted and those who’ve seen their career opportunities turned upside down by a lockdown followed by a recession.

Source: Channel 4

There’s also been a distinctive rise in the cultural celebration of staying in and doing nothing. During the darkest months of lockdown, this was a necessity, not a choice, but there is a segment of society for whom that habit remains something they want to preserve in our post-COVID world.

That trend bubbled up in my feeds last week, particularly with the “provocatively” titled Substack article “The Mainstreaming of Losderdom”. In the piece,

Telling the Bees

questions the rise in the popularity of posts which lionise the pastime of “laying in bed, watching my shows and staring at my phone”.

Image via Tell The Bees

There are a whole bunch of examples sourced from a range of platforms where someone posts about how their favourite place in the world is their bed and then racks up thousands of likes and views. This kind of post is prevalent among 20somethings, creating, as the author calls it, “an illusory community around… not doing anything”.

I think that the point about the “illusory community” is highly salient. There’s a question mark around whether this is indeed the lifestyle that millions aspire to (sitting in bed doing nothing) or if it more accurately captures a certain mood or vibe that many people feel during their week.

Sometimes, all I want to do is veg out on the sofa watching something that won’t tax my brain (I prefer the sofa to my bed, but the principle is the same). Just because you experience those feelings and appreciate the sense of belonging, it doesn’t mean we’re all perennially stuck in bed, wishing the outside world away.

The current state of our social and video-sharing platforms means that it’s a risky business to think that a selection of posts on a topic necessarily represents what people are actually doing. One of Ryan Broderick’s themes in Garbage Day is the gap between what’s viral and what’s popular - a gap that the Republican election campaign has been lampooned for not understanding. We saw it most starkly in the UK, with the Brat summer hype only reaching 25% of the British population.

One of the big reasons for this gap between ‘virality’ and ‘popularity’ is the increased number of lurkers on social and video-sharing platforms. You can pick your favourite stat from the many available - my go-to is 97% of tweets used to come from 25% of users (a stat which is undoubtedly now more extreme).

As Julia Alexander highlights in her excellent piece “People Aren’t Posting: What happens when people revolt against social media just becoming media?”, there’s a massive gap on our platforms when it comes to discoverability. For many people, this discoverability gap makes posting on social media feel like shouting into the void. Reach feels like the sole preserve of those online creators and influencers with significant audiences, constantly grinding to work the algorithms and maintain their visibility.

There’s then a tier of users beneath those established players who are striving for greater visibility - looking for viral trends to take advantage of, “growth hacking” the platforms, and investing budget to build an audience. It’s brutal, relentless work that often involves giving up on what you wanted to create in the first place to attempt to secure scale (like a band changing its musical style to find fame).

For anyone who wants to share their thoughts or work on the big platforms but isn’t interested in playing the scale game, the whole endeavour feels largely pointless (this is how I feel).

You get comfortable with your work only being seen by friends and family. And that is where most sharing happens anyway - Julia Alexander cites the example of Instagram boss Adam Mosseri highlighting how “most of the time people spend on Instagram is in DMs”.

“All the friends-sharing is moving in that direction,” said Mosseri. “There are more photos and videos shared in DMs than shared in Stories, and there’s way more shared in Stories than there is in Feed.”

The domination of mainstream creators and trending topics (interest graph over social graph) means most of what we see on the big platforms is entertainment. That creates a cycle where we expect a certain degree of entertainment from the posts we see, leading creators to be more performative in what they show.

Like great stand-up comedians, they exaggerate for comic or dramatic effect - and so, the universal desire for the odd “duvet day” becomes a performative lifestyle choice. But then, those of us who look to social sharing platforms for trends in behaviour have to decide where the line between “recognisable behaviour” and “performance” begins. In stand-up comedy, that line is easy to see. User-generated posts require a more critical eye.

It also may be the case that spotting recognisable behaviour and interesting cultural trends will only get harder if our sharing on platforms continues to retreat into private and ephemeral spaces.

The big tech platforms are scale businesses - they need new posts to fill the feeds of all those people vegetating in bed with their phones. There’s nothing sadder than an algorithmic feed that shows you the same post multiple times - anyone who has tried out LinkedIn’s Reels clone will be familiar with that theme.

Suppose fewer people post on the big platforms. In that scenario, AI-generated posts are obvious candidates to fill the content void, a trend we already see happening in pockets, most notably on Facebook. But there is a clear line between this void and Dead Internet Theory - where everything you read online has been artificially generated. That’s another deliberately provocative scenario (as James Ball describes it in Prospect, Dead Internet Theory is “a joke-come-conspiracy”).

However, an increasing number of AI-generated posts is a reality we all have to deal with, even on LinkedIn. If this increase continues to scale, it could create further challenges for comms teams looking to online behaviour to try and spot cultural trends.

The current crop of genAI tools are pattern-matching machines, and the people behind their deployment on social and video-sharing platforms look to viral posts as the base patterns for their prompts. If the source material for those patterns comes from a fixed group of creators and a small pool of posts, the AI-generated posts could get homogenous very quickly. In this world, social and video-sharing platforms are no longer democratised user-driven spaces where anyone can find an audience but broadcast channels with strange mirror-like echo chambers.

Spotting cultural trends within these echo chambers will be virtually impossible. There will still be value to brands and businesses in understanding what’s popular, making analysing comments and engagement metrics worthwhile.

But the richer reactions, the remixes and interpretations, will all happen behind closed doors. And so it feels increasingly like we’re reaching the end of the “free audience research” era that Twitter heralded. Understanding if a trend has caught on and seeing whether a behaviour is temporary or here to stay will likely require a return to qualitative and quantitative research.

Returning to regular research may not be as easy as returning to the office post-COVID, and it may take longer than just going on Twitter. Still, it’s undoubtedly a more accurate reflection of where we are than surveying a dead internet.