my issue with online interactions
The longer I am off of any social media and not constantly bombarded with the language and digital mannerisms inherent to it, the more I notice how odd it feels to detect that kind of language in others outside of those timelines and feeds.
I am active in very few Discord servers and most of them are small, friends-only groups. However, in the few public ones I am in, I often see groups of people whose choices of words and how to express themselves, how to enter conversations, their tone and views make them feel eerily... unreal. I've thought about it, and the best way I could describe it is as if someone trained AI on the most active Twitter users. There is a specific flavor of overly cool, casually careless, sarcastic, flippant, at times vitriolic undertone to everything that is hard to describe and pinpoint, mixed in with the latest meme speak (L, ratio, touch grass, etc.). Language formed throughout the years to attain maximum engagement within the culture of Twitter or Tumblr. The way they behave feels like it is part of a huge collective hivemind and makes them feel inauthentic and replaceable. If they didn't have different usernames and bios attached, I would not be able to tell them apart.
Obviously, adopting the language of the spaces we are in and people we are around of is completely normal. There are words and mannerisms we only use because our friends and family do. Certain language choices clearly tie us to our friend group, hobby, city, region, country. What ties us together in it is the location, our genes, our age range, our class, our education, our values, and similar things. It results in a group of people talking and acting similarly in some ways and it feels natural because they are similar in other aspects of their lifestyle or character. And still, there is something unique about them - when we interact, we still see their silliness, their little character quirks, their flaws, their sense of style. Everyone adds to the shared language and mannerisms by outside influence and evolving as people and then as a group.
What also helps: We all do something called code switching, which means we choose how to talk based on the space we are in and the people we are with; we're talking differently at the family function than at work, or we talk differently with the friend group than with the people at basketball practice, and we act differently with the cashier at the supermarket. We see our friends and family code switch all the time when we go through life with them, and I think it adds to feeling more authentic as well.
Online, absolutely massive amounts of people connect and share interest in something that otherwise might have nothing in common - they're not from the same area, they're not related, they do not hold the same status or class, they might not even have the same values or live close by each other and aren't close in age. And in general, that's a good thing. But I think this adds to the impression I get about people not seeming real online when they employ what I'll call mass-homogenized overly-online speech and tone, for a lack of better descriptions. It feels unnatural how such a large amount of extremely different people can talk /so/ similarly, basically completely identical, and I can run into them in very different contexts and spaces. The 28 year old software engineer that is very online will talk the same way online as the 16 year old K-Pop fan. And because everything online is filtered through what people decide to even show or post, and I can only see their profiles, any other traits to make them more unique like their in real life mannerisms, voice, clothing and code switching happening elsewhere isn't visible to me.
And so far, I just observe that at least online, these people do not do any code switching at all. They will use the same tone and language on any website, any format, any server for it is The Online Language for them. I don't even think it is an active choice, it feels more like it has been trained into them by algorithms and being exposed to it for a large portion of their day all year. You want to fit in, you are supposed to want followers and likes and retweets, you don't want to alienate your followers, and you adopt the language of the people you like the most on that platform. You adopt what is going viral.
I didn't use to notice it before, but I've been noticing it more and more and how jarring it actually is to have this kind of language interjected where it doesn't feel like it actually belongs or fits in, and how inauthentic it feels from the person since it doesn't feel like a choice of expression but instead, like being in compliance with virality; and how bot-like it makes these people come across.
It's sometimes somewhat of a vibe killer for me, or something that feels mildly emotionally or at least socially unintelligent or immature, since it comes across as just bruteforcing one, very one-dimensional seeming code into a completely opposite conversational atmosphere. And the more people actually write like that in a space, the more eerie it feels to me, like AI talking to each other. I may be alone in this impression, but I still felt like sharing. Maybe someone can relate.