L07-week7-words

The dominant hashtag on TikTok and YouTube in 2025 is GRWM (Get Ready With Me), where contents are about people sharing the performance of everyday life as contents. The desire for parasocial relationships is now replacing traditional communities, which are typically in-person, localized, and regional.

There is always a performance and authenticity paradox in this kind of parasocial relationships, which always confuses me. We know that filming GRWM cannot be authentic as performance is necessary unless the filming happens spontaneously. This disconnection and paradoxical behavior reveals something important about our collective unconscious. We simultaneously crave authenticity while accepting staged content. I think this is a new form of collective myth-making, where realness is being consumed as entertainment. We are craving the 'feeling of connection' more than actual truth.

Having plentiful resources on the Internet reduces the accessibility problem, but it also means that anyone can be the source of information, which means that knowledge now comes from many unreliable sources. We spend much more time on deciding whether something is reliable rather than making the effort to find and learn the information/knowledge itself. The role of education needs to be more focused on critical thinking, not on learning knowledge itself, from kindergarten to university.