I think we can all agree that cringe is universal
How lexical fallacy complicates emotion theory, the tiktokification of feeling, and all about cringe.
Emotions might be universal but not like that
In the field of emotion studies, with all its various players—psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists—there’s an epic debate. Are emotions universal and innate or are they socially constructed? Finally, I have confirmation in my feeling of “why not both?”
It turns out that we needed a Cambridge-trained philosopher in the mix to point out that the key to understanding emotion is in the doing.
In The New Yorker piece, How Universal Are Our Emotions?, Nikhil Krishnan offers an example: the first time the author encountered the word “cringe” it was used as an adjective in the British version of The Office. That usage was based on the German word Fremdschämen (it’s always a German word isn’t it!) for the embarrassment one feels when someone else has, perhaps obliviously, embarrassed themselves. Even without being an expert in British culture or being familiar with the German word, Krishnan was able to understand the concept.
The most adamant social constructivists like Batja Mesquita, a Dutch psychologist, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, a American neuroscientist, rely heavily on linguistics to undermine the universalist view. Krishnan suggests that we consider what Wittgenstein described as “lexical fallacy” if we are relying linguistic arguments.
What are we supposed to take away from the fact that another language doesn’t have different words for shame and embarrassment? That its speakers have no way of knowing which situations call for which emotions? Does my embarrassment at an undone zipper turn into shame when I am around other Tamil speakers? Is my shame at forgetting my mother’s birthday modulated into embarrassment?
The list goes on. English and German have one word for homesickness, French doesn’t. So does that mean the pain a French emigrant feels at a mug of day-old diner coffee is any less acute than that of an Englishman faced with a cup of weak, lukewarm tea in a Panera? Even if one language lacks a word for a concept, it doesn’t mean that we can’t understand each other.
An alternative approach, anthropologist Alan Fiske suggests that we elucidate unfamiliar terms with familiar ones. Think of kama mutra, the Sanskrit phrase for the emotion evoked by a sudden intensification of communal sharing. Even without a similar phrase in English, we can start to understand it through other words such as heartwarming, moving, touching, collective pride, tenderness, and in the context of the internet— awww. (This is the approach I’m taking to internet emotion here and here.)
But an even better method is to understand emotion by seeing it in action. So when I wrote about how so many people rallied around separating those two stuck-together bowls that would be an illustration of kama mutra in action.
What I take away from all this is that our everyday “folk theory” of emotion is not too far off. Emotions can’t be understood in simple binaries. Sometimes emotions reflect an inner mental state (feeling wistful for a time past), sometimes they describe a physical state (saying that a baby cooing is happy), sometimes it’s a state we attribute to someone else (he’s clearly stressed) or to a social setting (the internet feels outraged today). Because of this flux, understanding emotion is a continual, ongoing, and worthwhile activity.
The TikTokification of feeling
It’s difficult not to stumble over pieces about the downfall of Facebook and the victory of TikTok these days, with Meta apparently tweaking the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram to become more like TikTok.
Facebook was built on leveraging hard-to-replicate, large social graphs to generate a never-ending stream of engaging content. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve probably tried alternatives only to abandon them soon after you realized you didn’t have any “friends” on the new platform. TikTok doesn’t require friends to be engaging though; it relies on visual novelty, music, and direct emotional expression to keep people interested.
Here’s what interests me in all this—what are the implications for emotional expression as more and more people shift from Facebook to TikTok (or Facebook becomes more like TikTok)? Let’s compare the differences in how people express emotion on each platform:
Standardized emotional expression in the form of reactions
Emoji-like responses shown as tallies
Higher priority for more reactions or certain types of reactions (anger may be given more weight), since the number of reactions plays a role in what shows up
Unironic emotional expression, still exaggerated and not always genuine though
Words are important too, whether impassioned plea, angry rant, or irritated reply
TIKTOK
Exaggerated emoting so that people will pick up on the emotion in a very short video, or as they scroll past quickly, or when there is music and no voice
Stylized gestures like the Gen Z face slap or ahegao face
Extreme effects like Expressify which exaggerates facial expressions or the crying filter adapted from Snapchat
Shorter cycles of gestures and facial expressions that take hold and are then replaced
Ironic, or at least self-aware, emotional expression
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On both platforms, emotion is a social activity we perform for each other that might produce an internal state or transform into a cultural norm. But there are some big differences here too. Facebook’s approach is limited with preset choices for expression, designed for a compounding effect (and that standardization is better for data collection and ad sales, presumably). Combine the emotional contagion due to algorithmic amplification with less ironic distance from your feelings and things get heated.
By contrast, expressing emotion on TikTok has adapted to the lightning force of the swipe, highly exaggerated to get the feeling across amid a cacaphony of faces but tempered with a dash of self-aware distance. The creativity of expression is a long way from Facebook’s standardization but still limited by the effects built in to the app and trends on the platform itself. Algorithmic amplification is still a factor here; the platform may encourage Tourette’s like tics and body dysmorphia.
If Facebook does begin to concentrate on optimizing in-the-moment engagement over the social graph, we could see a ripple of emotional effects. Expression is likely to become even more hyperbolic and “alive” (there’s something about seeing a face on video), with more variety in creative expression too.
Friday Feeling > Cringe
🔑 DEFINITION
The secondhand embarrassment from watching someone else’s awkward moment.
See also: cringey, public shaming, problematic fave, epic fail, roasting, cheugy
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Cringe took off in forums in the early 2000s, when the practice of humiliating oneself online was still somewhat novel. Since 2004, Google searches for the term have been steadily increasing. In 2006, a now-beloved clip known as Star Wars Kid (later commemorated in cringe comedy Arrested Development) was uploaded to YouTube. In 2007, the first entry for cringeworthy appeared in Urban Dictionary. The Reddit forum r/cringe originated with a local TV news segment on self-styled “teen werewolves” in 2009, the same year that and cringeworthy.net was launched. By 2010, cringe was everywhere.
As cringe culture was blowing up online, the entertainment industry embraced cringe comedy, a genre grounded in social awkwardness with a dose of guilty pleasure. The Larry Sanders Show or America’s Funniest Home Videos were early examples, but it didn’t really take off until the 2000s. There were mockumentary-style comedies like The Office, where reactions to the idiotic comments of Michael Scott induced uncomfortable laughs. And there were pseudo-reality shows like Da Ali G show, where inappropriate questions posed in interviews with unsuspecting celebrities were cringe with a splash of schadenfreude. The genre lives on in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where viewers cringe at Larry David’s social faux pas, and, Nathan for You, where preposterous business schemes capture a similar plane of unease.
From the early days, calling out questionable fashion choices, oversharing, and uncomfortable come-ons of unsuspecting social media posters often led to cyberbullying and long-term mental health effects. The majority of viral cringey TikToks are posted by people without the privilege of beauty, wealth, or in-depth knowledge of internet norms. They likely never meant for thousands of people to comment on a disability, an unusual hobby, or a less-than-perfect house. Occasionally though, the subject of cringe becomes an alternative icon, like Australian creator @superchloeone who has since become a strong spokesperson for people with bipolar disorder.
By 2021, worldwide Google searches for cringe were at an all time high, r/cringe boasted over 1.3 million members, and the word was chosen as teen youth word of the year (edging out sus). There are different variations, but it’s internet mainstream.
💬 EXPRESSION
Early cringe culture was about secondhand embarrassment on behalf of friends and family like when you get a superstitious email chain from your mom. It could also be self-deprecating, wincing at your own awkward behavior when you double tap an old picture in the middle of a deep dive on someone’s Instagram. Cringe, at its best, is gently poking fun at forgivable human flaws.
As it’s become more widespread, cringe has shifted to identifying awkward moments of strangers. In its milder form, it’s something like “I think I speak for all of us, when I say, yikes” over a cronut or skinny jeans. When it calls out fanboys or furries, cosplayers or goths, comments can be cruel. At its worst, cringe ostracizes people, implicitly indicating insiders and outsiders.
💗 EXPERIENCE
The dictionary definition of cringe is a physical response to an uncomfortable expectation— to shrink, cower, flinch, or contract. Online, cringe was originally watched through fanned fingers, impossible to look and impossible to look away. It might bring on a queasy lurch in the pit of the stomach or clenched hands while waiting for an anticipated cringe moment.
The visceral response to cringe has been muted by the genre’s gradual mainstreaming through cringe comedy, meme generators, and TikTok compilations on YouTube. Because of this reflexive awareness, it’s easy to identify but more difficult to really feel.
Early cringe evoked empathy through a recognition that “oh, I could totally see myself doing that”. And it often left behind a sense of relief, feeling grateful that it wasn’t you even if it easily could have been.
Just as the viseral response changed with its ubiquity, so too has the empathy response. Rather than making you wince in recognition and shared pain, cringe now comes at a remove. The secondhand embarrassment now stems from a lack of self-awareness. After a decade of watching cringe, it’s can be cringey when someone doesn’t understand how they’re coming across.
❝ QUOTE
"My favorite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic - that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.” Taika Waititi
💡 BIG PICTURE
Awkwardness has an upside. It can foster a sense of shared humanity. Because it can reveal that gap between who we think we really are and what the world is seeing, it can help us to be a bit kinder to ourselves and to others.
Currently, the most popular cringe is parody, where the genre functions like a dose of exposure therapy where we are drawn to our deepest fears. Posts about what a cringey person might do invite people to laugh at an imagined person rather than a real one. And that may be at the root of it’s popularity—the human impulse to understand how we fit in and how we can stand out.
🤔 LEARN MORE
Read one of the original takes on TikTok and cringe culture by Taylor Lorenz
Here’s a collection of classically hot influencers making fools of themselves by Leia Jospé, the “Curator of Cringe”
Listen to stories that make us Cringe on This American Life
Read Melissa Dahl’s book, Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, for a deep dive on the cringe culture of the internet
( >︹<)
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗