For almost a year now we are told to stay home, respect social distancing rules and limit the interactions with other people etc. As a result, we do not see many people in person but does it mean that we stopped communicating with others?
Over the past year we observe a huge boost in social media. People found many creative ways to actually bond with others in the virtual world. Great examples of that are the growing trends on platforms such as tik tok, Instagram, Facebook where many people recreate one trend or a challenge and post their version of it. Many of those are connected to some charities so people follow the trend and at the same time raise money for a specific case. Sometimes the challenges and trends might seem dumb and pointless and sometimes they do not benefit any charity but I think that it is still a nice way to bring people together.
The trends could be dancing, cooking, doing specific make up, taking a particular photo or video, almost everything that we can think of can be taken as a new trend.
One example of the recent challenges present on the Internet is called the Tetris Challenge. This trend started in September 2020 and was popular within the range of public services providers such as police, firemen etc. The trend is basically basing on taking a picture from the above of all the equipment that a given job needs and posting it on Instagram. Some of the captions said “This is what we need to save lives”. Soon after it started we could read:” public services units from around the world have joined in, artistically photographing their work equipment (and even themselves) laid out in tidy rows.” or “Today’s Tetris Challenge is a fun way to visualize the often chaotic nature of working in the emergency services in a visually satisfying, organized way.” Some of their posts got almost a thousand likes and also a few hundred reposts. I think that it is quite fun and interesting to look at.
Another example of a trend, which was recently quite popular on Instagram is that everyone can add “post a picture of …” and followers just say what pictures they want you to show, for example the picture form your best holidays etc. I actually saw many people participating, including well known celebrities. This particular trend was very popular during the last week as many people thought of it as some kind of summary from 2020 that was coming to the end.
I think that in some way the above examples show that even though we live in the times of the pandemic, many lockdowns and not seeing many people in person we still seek interaction with other people and realise that we are not the only ones in this difficult situation. We still can learn about each other, bond and get inspired and motivated to do something. Even if it is just a “stupid” challenge on the Internet it is still better than nothing and gives us hope for the better.