Collective interests

By nature, people are inclined to participate in what others are participating in, social media being the main proponent of this bandwagon effect.

On platforms like TikTok, niches in the algorithms often create subsections such as “BookTok,” a subgroup in the app that relates to all things literature. Typically, people hyper-fixate on the same book that is going viral at that moment.

On social media, it is difficult to not take part in a trend because the algorithm of each user’s feed will pump the most popular, therefore similar, content that pertains to what the user typically enjoys.

In BookTok, a notable name, Colleen Hoover, had her best-selling book, “It Ends With Us,” at number one for 151 weeks in the New York Times Best Sellers List. According to an interview with Hoover in the NYT, she dedicates most of her success to BookTok and the fame of her novels from the app itself.

“Social media can be used for entertainment purposes on the app, but even more so to influence the decisions we make and what we do as a part of the app,” sophomore Santiago Gonzalez said.

According to Fox 5 New York, interviews of people that make or sell cheese detailed how in just a matter of a week these cheesemongers were nearly sold out of feta cheese when a viral cooking video of a quick feta cheese pasta recipe was posted. The receipe which created the sauce intrigued a large enough chunk of social media to sell out most of the stock of cheese.

These trends essentially serve as a reflection of society’s baseline and interests.

Something so bizarre as a specific cheese can leave supermarkets out of stock just because of the major power and influence social media has on today’s society. Although social media holds the power to distribute such ideas, it is the users that enforce it.

Seeing that social media is intertwined so heavily with real-world decisions, as a collective force, modern-day culture is highly persuaded by the opinion of each user. Eventually, that expression is clumped together to establish this major unified and unanimous agreement on what comes and goes. More users leech on to already formed conclusions on social media since this cycle of consuming, adopting and discarding occurs constantly through cyberspace with each click extending the length of time a trend will remain relevant.