… we'll even add an extra opening strategy called the Gen Z shake. As soon as a creator starts their video with the phone in their hand, they'll set it down on a surface, causing the viewer's perspective to suddenly shake. This is a very deliberate, planned tactic meant to visually disrupt scrolling patterns and capture attention at the beginning

The nature of user-generated content means that anyone can have a platform, removing agency from the prescriptive powers that be and kick-starting an entirely new decolonization of language.

Our blind trust in algorithms helps us believe in the categories assigned to us. Even though personalized recommendations are probabilistic —trying to predict what we like—we often treat them as deterministic , as if they already know what we like. Through that attitude, we become "calcified in our digital identities," each of which can be uniquely

… we evolved pattern recognition and episodic memory as survival mechanisms, since they're necessary for crucial behaviors like learning and socializing. Once we were able to tie causes to events, we were better suited for reacting to stimuli in our environment.

We also turned into meaning-making machines, unable to shake ourselves from thinking in

This is a new phenomenon called context collapse . Because there are so many different audiences interacting on social media, communication intended for one audience often finds unintended audiences, which could process it in a different context and then use the information in a new way (in these cases, as general jokes rather than specific

this: A 2023 University of Oxford study found that essentially all influencers are “purposefully minimizing their own creativity in order to pander to perceived algorithmic tastes and subsequently enhance their visibility.” This affects not only our choice of content but also our aesthetics, creative processes, and overall strategies

Rather than knowing you, then, the algorithm moreso guides you into who you will become.

In the end, a word will stick if it serves a new role in the English language. If, as with "cancel," it defines a necessary concept, then we say that it's filled a semantic gap : a concept that we didn't previously have a word for. Had there already been an entrenched word for the same idea, we would have had no need to cancel people. Sometimes,

the engagement treadmill. As certain types of content get engagement, more creators make those types of videos, so more people engage with it, so more creators make it.