copy culture.
The Repetition of social media. Illustration by @lignestudio.co.
It should be a surprise to no one that Instagram looks completely different from a year ago. The rise of Reels, vertical content, trending sounds and awkward dance moves has completely transformed our feeds. The rate of updates has increased exponentially in the last two years, and the app shows no sign of slowing these updates down. Every week Adam Mosseri pops up at the top of my feed sharing some insight into the next new feature, test or change Meta will be implementing into the app.
As a result of these changes there has been a huge shift in the content appearing in the home feed. My small curated list of who I follow ceases to appear, and instead of catching up with my favourite creators’ content I suddenly feel like I’ve entered a party where there’s no one I know.
The only recognisable thing in my feed nowadays is the short blasts of catchy music and sounds, the bopping of popular dance routines, and lip-synched skits. It seems no matter how far I scroll down in my feed I can’t escape the wrath of these repetitive short videos.
If you’ve seen my recent TikTok video (view below), you’ll know that I explored the phrase ‘Copy Culture’, a term that describes the new era of social media we are entering.
I define Copy Culture as sort of a new era of social media, a different type of way we create and consume culture. As mentioned in my TikTok, in the past the highest ranking content was always the most unique or outrageous ideas (think Logan Paul stunts on Youtube). Whereas now the content that ranks the highest is nearly always some sort of remix of another video.
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As a creative, this shift has been incredibly hard to deal with. As Chris Hau said in his incredible video ‘You’re not that creative and here’s why…’ whenever I post original content there is one of two things will happen:
1. The post will get no reach because the algorithm doesn’t recognise what it is I’m posting so it doesn’t get seen.
Or very rarely, 2, for some reason that post will go ‘viral’, it will become a ‘trend’ and very big accounts will see it, copy it, and then they will get the credit for it.
It’s almost as if the way to measure how ‘successful’ your content is, is by how many people reproduce it, and, as an artist, this is terrifying.
I know a lot of people will probably say using trending video formats is ‘remixing’ or ‘recreating’ it, but honestly I believe recreating something is completely different. Not to mention finding the creator of the original trend is quite difficult as the bigger accounts tend to flood our feeds. Also, people just aren’t crediting the original creator any more.
I did mention in my TikTok videos that there may be an offline impact of Copy Culture. It’s definitely something to think about because as we become more immersed in the online world, it’s likely social media trends will cause cultural shifts throughout our offline world too.
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What do you think? Are we entering a new era of Social Media? How will this impact our offline lives?
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or email me. And, if you want to stay up-to-date follow me on TikTok and Instagram ❋
Love Always,
Britt x