this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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I had an epihany recently.
I saw some folks of mine mimic mannerisms I happened to see cable news.
...I mean, it seems obvious, but if you turn on Fox News or a YouTube/Twitter feed, the average influencer acts like a enraged asshole. Each a unique asshole; it's not even about politics or anything.
I know the old person sentiment; yes, people have always been jerks.
...But is this where people are losing social skills? Like, they watch this shit and think that's normal public behavior, even if their many years of prior living doesn't resemble that.
I think that's definitely a contributing factor, along with reduced face to face social interactions in everyday life giving people less of a baseline to work off of.
Back when I was in highschool and college (mid-00s to mid-10s) I could usually clock very quickly who had been a shut in nerd mostly watching shows, and sometimes even the specific shows they had watched, by their mannerisms.
Decent amount of manic aggressive girls who learned from that horrible anime archetype (cat princess from Outlaw Star, derringer girl from Trigun, many tsundere characters). One guy I know was pretty much directly emulating Church from RvB. Another guy that was Spiderman and Goku. Usually my gut feelings checked out later when we'd talk about favorite shows and such.
Yeah.
And I don't mean to jump on the "TV rots your brain" type of train (which critics have been saying about fiction forever).
But humans are literally programmed to emulate peers. And I think the line is especially blurry when those "peers" are presented as news hosts, 'real world' influencers, things that are seemingly real life content yet are total clickbait caricatures, and then that's hyper personalized and constantly pinging you on a phone.
Folks really into certain TV characters (for example) know they aren't real on some level and get normalized in life. But that system breaks with the kind of content we have now.