Dear User,
I messed up, big time. Actually, I resent that admission. It totally wasn’t my mistake, people online just love to dogpile. One tiny slip, word spreads like the plague, and before you know it, you’re toast. Can’t a girl even be ironic nowadays without triggering some kind of Peasants Revolt? With that being said, it did great for my engagement:
Twitter followers: 210
Instagram followers: 940
Tiktok followers: 5,450
Last month we gabbed about exploiting the loneliness economy by leaning into users’ aesthetic and connective needs. Well, I took my own advice and started experimenting with, let’s say, some quantitative over qualitative posts. I was throwing everything at my damp-ridden flat-share walls to see what stuck. I effed around and found out.
The post in question was so inoffensive, I couldn’t believe it blew up like that. I’ve done edgier things online when I was fourteen (but I’ve had enough cancel-anxiety to guarantee that you’re never going to see those tweets).
Let’s set the stage. I’m in my bedroom, it’s past eleven and the big light is on because the bulb blew in my only lamp (and tbh, I can’t be bothered to replace it). I’m about to take my makeup off and hit my plushies with the biggest bozie of their lives, but that would be a missed opportunity. About half an hour ago, I was doom-scrolling through Tiktok when I got drop kicked in the face by one of those ‘to be loved is to be changed’ posts. The first image was of a kid with his new puppy: ‘to be loved’, followed by an image of the kid, now an adult, saying goodbye to his loyal, elderly dog, with tears in his eyes: ‘is to be changed’. For about eight minutes I was totally inconsolable. Then I scrolled on. But I needed to capture that emotion for my post, and I knew I could bring it back. So I scrolled back through my likes, found the post, forced a couple more tears out of my already mascara stained eyes, and hit the plus button. I took five seconds of footage of my puffy face with the blur filter turned up to max, and then typed over the top of it:
I would do anything to walk my dog one last time. To watch his ears bounce in the breeze, tongue stuck out, begging me to throw the ball again and again and again. back then it was a forgettable part of the everyday. now i feel the weight of every second i walk alone.
Not bad, I thought, considering I’ve never owned a dog.
At first, it seemed that the audience agreed with me. Within an hour of posting the video was at over a thousand views, with two comments, both sharing how relatable they found it. Considering none of my posts had hit over the three hundred view mark in weeks, I was stoked. Then the hate started. It wasn’t what I had expected. I have some deep rooted fear with every post I make, that somebody is going to call me a try hard, imply that everything I do is inauthentic and boring, and I’ll be blacklisted from everyone’s fyp before I can say ‘abolish serfdom’. But these hate comments focused on something so much less sinister. The one part of the video, in fact, that was authentic. My crying.
‘sick of people crying on the internet for attention tbh’
‘who starts crying and thinks “i should post this on tiktok”??’
‘what has happened to this society 🙄’
‘ATENTION SEEKER MUCH’
The more of these comments users made, the more it seemed to encourage other users to comment essentially the same thing. My views quickly went from five thousand to fifty thousand, with more likes and comments streaming in by the minute. It was all very exciting, and I was fascinated more than concerned. It wasn’t the first time I’d expressed my feelings publicly, but real tears seemed to trigger an onslaught of hate totally out of line with anything I’d experienced before.
The comments themselves were pretty tame, thanks to Tiktok’s filtering system, but I also got a couple of Insta DM’s with sentiments that were frankly gross, icky, and revolting like it’s 1381. But all publicity is good publicity, right?
In The Picture of Dorian Gray the conniving Lord Henry said: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ Thanks, level one EngLit for teaching me I have more in common with the villain of the story than our shared soft spot for lanky blondes. I’ll take his bank details next. But I digress, for today I learned some important lessons, and I hope you did too: if you want a spot in the limelight, know thy enemy, sleaze the day, and master crocodile tears.
Remember, User, you never heard any of this from me.
XoXo, and all my parasocial love,
Mini Disc ❤
(PRJCT_MINI.DSC is a monthly column by Ophelia Po, exclusive to qmunicatemagazine.co.uk. Stay tuned for more installments!)
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