Realer-than-real vibes

The story of vibe origins, authentic vibes on social media apps, domesticity vlogs with homey vibes, and light as vibe metaphor.

Welcome to my new subscribers, especially from Dutch Digital Day and Collision and RBC’s design event (yes, it’s been a busy couple of weeks)! Thanks to everyone who’s stayed with me too 🤗 Let’s talk vibes, moods, and evoking authenticity online.

📳 Vibes as cultural mood

You probably already know a vibe shift is coming, courtesy of a cheeky article in The Cut earlier this year. Or perhaps it’s already here? It occurs when a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated, especially true as we emerge and re-merge again out of a pandemic. The originator of the term, trend forecaster Sean Monahan offers this anatomy.

This week, Tom F. Wright speculated on the origin of vibes in The Atlantic. Vibes are “the prevailing shorthand for a cultural atmosphere, mood, and zeitgeist”. Talk about vibes it swaps data and analysis for emotional undercurrents. Wright contends that we use “vibes” when in the past we might have used the term, “charisma”—another word that describes the elusively emotive. The big difference though is that charisma is an individual characteristic while vibes are collective emotions.

Vibes has its roots in the good vibrations counterculture of the 1960s which itself references the 1880s spiritualist movement, so the term owes as much to Victorian seances as it does to California communes. It’s strange there’s no mention here about the internet (!) because vibes are all about channeling ambient mood from the electronic ether.

🗑 Messy moments are a big mood

Sick of polished, hyper-curated feeds filled with beautiful people in beautiful homes featuring perfect meals and perfect moments? Yeah, me too. BeReal, according to Vice, might be the only good social media app. It’s where Gen Zs are reviving spontaneous pics and candid communications just like the good-old-days™️ of the internet.

With every new social media app, come the naysayers. You might think it’s a silly gimmick (that borrows heavily from the recent Dispo app, which hasn’t quite recovered from scandal). But it’s not nearly as ridiculous as Yo, where the sole interaction was volleying “yo” back and forth, or Peach, which gave us gems like “you’ve been caked” (uhhhh, what?). Cynics among us might call it another way to waste time while feeding the data surveillance apparatus. Not me.

Less pressure to perform and present the perfect self, creates a little vulnerability—the kind that deepens relationships. Sharing mundane moments builds a feeling of camaraderie. Fewer carefully composed pictures of cool parties equal less FOMO. No follower tallies translate to no influencers. The main draw is hanging out with your friends, and that’s all you can really do on BeReal.

Simultaneously taking front-and back-facing photos at the behest of an amber-alert style notification can end up feeling stressful though. Maybe the next big social media app will be something between an ugly photo of a forehead and a half-eaten salad and a perfectly staged selfie in front of a glossy backdrop.

🏠 Home as a feeling

In the same zone as ambient channels that stream lo-fi beats or page-turning ASMR videos are domesticity vlogs, warmly documented by Hyejoo Lee in Real Life. Unlike glossy real estate tours or home hacks or desk setup tours, cottagecore day-in-the-life videos are more about embodying a feeling than making a spectacle. These videos document quotidian rituals like watering plants or preparing lunch. “Music, camerawork, montage, and oftentimes whimsical captions and narration intensify the experience of home as feeling, something text cannot fully stimulate.” I first noticed this type of vlog during the early days of the pandemic, finding calm in the soothing routines. These videos may even provide solace to those who can’t afford a home so that people can experience home-as-feeling with or without home-as-property. You can get a feel for these homey videos here, here, or here or see it reflected in meal-kit company HelloFresh’s ads too.

🖼 Fleeting feelings writ in light

The age of Romanticism—yes, that Romanticism—was another vibe-obsessed era. This latest entry in the Public Domain Review’s Conjectures series, inspired by master viber J.M.W. Turner and his The Channel Sketchbook, is a short sensory history of light. Peter Schmidt’s fragmentary Encyclopedia of Light bridges the centuries between shimmery marine moods and digital ephemera: “We write, now, of course, with light, looking at glowing screens. But it is a strangeness of our monitors that we erase what we have written with still more light: a blinking cursor, backing over the words.” Google image queries and DALL-E prompts are inadequate to the task of illustrating this moving meditation, I’m afraid.

That’s all the feels for this week!

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆

xoxo

Pamela 💗