Inside Scoop of Going Viral on TikTok
Written by Trinity Duong
It’s been said before. Social media is inauthentic. What we see on our screens is a surface-level moment that cannot capture the real. Often the best memories we live are not taken on a phone but rather lived in the now. Discardure of the need to force memories makes the present feel real value. Disconnecting from a world we know is fake makes things feel like they actually exist. How strange is it that the fakest moments are the ones with the most likes, shares, and comments?
Recently I had a TikTok go viral for one of the fakest moments in my life. On the subway, I selected a sound and filmed a few video clips depicting me finding the “love of my life”, who through the video portrayal looked like a total stranger. The person I had filmed is strictly one of my best friends and we had created this scenario thinking nothing of it. Later on, we found ourselves at a bar and I realized I’m getting thousands on thousands of views. Strangers were commenting on my video asking for an update, so once again thinking nothing of it, I used the same sound and filmed the “love of my life” hanging out with my friends, with the connotation that I had asked this stranger out. My comments flooded with people applauding me for my bravery, asking for a tutorial, and telling us how beautiful of a couple we made. We were blown away by the fact that that fated moment in the metro had led us to nearly a million views, both videos combined. The next night we decided to ride this five minutes of fame and filmed him “taking me on a date”. Same reaction. It was almost unbelievable that because we had been outwardly fake about every fabrication we’ve made, it pushed our video to the top of so many users on TikTok. To this day the video still receives so many notifications.
I couldn't help but wonder, is this what people want? Are we so consumed and enamored by situations that rarely happen, or in our case never did, that the real-life we live now is not good enough? We lose ourselves in the fabrication of what could happen.
The days following we began to receive a few hate comments. We received comments saying that we were in different leagues, meaning one was better looking than the other. There were some racist comments, comments presuming people's backgrounds, comments that really confused us. For us, this scenario was completely fake, for others, it was so real that they felt the need to knock us down.
It was funny in a way because the people that were sending us hate were going through the same motion as the people that we're sending us love. Sitting behind their screens, they see something that they in their current position don't have and people lean in one of three ways, they love, they hate, or they scroll in total nutrality.
It all stems from a yearning for something they don't have and it's shocking to see where that can lead us.
All I’ve learned from going viral is that the more fake something seems, the more otherworldly it is compared to our current lives, leading us to crave it more. People use the internet as an escape, to live through the lens of someone else and we can either be happy for others or be unhappy for ourselves leading us to be envious of the inauthenticity.
