Here's a not-so-novel theory of cultural development that you should be aware of, especially if you're an older person wondering about the behaviors of younger people: When TV and the internet first emerged on the cultural scene, they had a unifying effect on people. After all, there were only a handful of television channels you could watch, so everyone watched The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, M*A*S*H, and All in the Family. Just take a look at IMDB's list of the Most Watched Series Finales Ever, and you'll see it's dominated by shows that first aired in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Fast forward to the early 2000s, when social media first emerged, and you have a similar effect: everyone had a MySpace or Facebook account because there wasn't really any other game in town. But that unity rapidly gave way to fragmentation. Just as cable TV fragmented into Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Amazon TV, etc, so too did social media fragment into smaller, more niche spaces, from Tumblr blogs and subreddits to Discord servers and Twitch chat rooms.
Driven by the all-powerful algorithm, feeding different people different interests, the younger generations disappeared into siloed parts of the internet, many of which earned nicknames of their own. TikTok is the best example: there's BookTok for users who love to read, FinTok for users who want to learn about investing and compound interest, and of course, FitTok for people who want to learn about compound lifts or receive dieting advice. Crucially, you can spend hundreds of hours in any one of these niche communities without ever learning about the existence of the others.
