How TikTok Reduces Irish Life to a Cliché

Against the G-Splitters

Photo by Tavis Beck on Unsplash

Anthony Lane, the film critic for the New Yorker, once noted in a review of Mission: Impossible 2 that the more global a film’s ambitions, the more it tends to reduce any individual country to a narrow set of stereotypes (he was critiquing a scene in the movie that tells us we’re in Spain with a close-up of a flamenco dancer’s clacking castanets). We might worry that movies are becoming a less vital artistic force in recent decades but a quick glance at social media shows you that new media is experiencing the same problems as the old, in an even more concentrated and obnoxious form.

Part of the price of being able to fit all human experience into 10 second clips available via your phone, is that everything must have its niche, and must stay in that niche. Social Media is a content Mukbang: the user is joylessly and compulsively scoffing fast food, and an awkward or complex idea is like suddenly coming across a brussel sprout or a human finger. That’s not what the compulsive scoffer wants - they want something greasy and familiar so they can shove it down their throat and move on to the next thing. To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, Social Media is a reducing valve and in order to distract effectively it compresses issues, ideas and identities for the viewer into a shape that they can consume quickly and forget easily. But what happens when national identities, and national self-perceptions are fed through this machine? What, in other words, does it want from Irishness?

Since a platform like TikTok is catering for a young audience that is mostly American, what social media wants from us is an identity that is aligned to the historic American understanding of Ireland, but modernised, made more exciting and with the right political valances. We get to be roguish and silver-tongued, twinkly, earthy and “real”. Catholicism is 100% out and embarrassing but retaining a certain kind of ethereal spirituality is still good. On the political side, the acceptable modern version of our revolutionary history is that it must always be socialistic, liberationist, and anti-colonial; what social media likes is either revolutionaries or at least revolutionary-friendly people in that spirit. Layered on top of that are the universal modern values and attitudes beloved of status-conscious young people, repositioned in an Irish context. The ideal Irish person on social media is a G-splitting, Up the Ra singing, soulful socialist poet-revolutionary, with a twinkle in his eye and salty joke on his tongue, and anything that conflicts with that has to go.

This isn’t simply a public relations matter. Social media is a mirror that tells the world what you look like but tells you what you look like. It creates a feedback loop whereby you increasingly lean towards becoming the stereotype of you and your past that has been created for the benefit of an international audience. This can come out in weird and contradictory ways.

This clip from “Frankie’s Cultural Observations”, a popular Irish TikToker, got a lot of social media traction recently and is a good example of the phenomenon. Frankie is one of a number of Gen Z content creators who gained success - initially at least - through clips focusing on Irish cultural trends, quirks and stereotypes. A recurring theme amongst these content creators and discussions of Ireland on social media generally is a deep contempt for Irish Americans and Irish American tourists; the younger and more left-wing the perspective of the cultural commentary, the more contemptuous of the yanks it is. We see it in this clip as Frankie blankly scolds the tourists for having allowed themselves to be sold a phony picture-postcard version of an Ireland that doesn’t exist, their ignorance of basic Irish history and geography, and for their loudness.

I don’t mind Frankie’s videos but the recent intensification of the mockery of American tourists is more than people being a little embarrassed by their relatives from out of town; it’s more unremitting and mean-spirited. There are a couple of explanations for this including Irish American connection to a cultural idea of Ireland that is not merely gone but seen by many Irish people as rejected and discredited, plus some submerged irritation about the link between tourism and the housing crisis. But the distoriting impact of social media is absolutely a factor. Since Irish identity is algorithmically steered in the direction of strident and snide anti-colonialism one of the ways this expresses itself is in Irish antipathy towards Americans and American tourists.

But remember that the distorting influence works in both directions. How do we square the idea that Irish-Americanism is cringe with the fact that the first question we ask a visiting American celebrity is about their tenuous Irish roots? The sorts of things that we critique Irish Americans for celebrating are no less inherently reductive, phony or absurd than the things we celebrate and project outward. Count the mentions of the Barrys Tea, or the immersion, or the good scissors, or anglo difficulty with our "unpronounceable" names in any Paul Mescal press tour - I’m talking about press tours in Ireland. Not only are Irish people more than willing to play up to reductive themes in Irish society for the benefit of international (and ironically, often American) social media audiences, but to come back from America in order to do it for Irish people in Ireland!

The willingness to project Irish stereotypes outward and roll around in them at home, while also loathing American tourists for bringing the wrong cliché with them when they visit is so absurd that it can only have a neurotic basis. I think there’s something there about the Irish discomfort with extrovert tall poppies coming into direct conflict with the desire to impress the visiting big shot and touch the hem of their garment, sometimes mixed with an unspoken sense of inadequacy about Ireland and Irish culture that comes out as sarcasm. Social media has a role in all this by narrowing and concentrating our cultural range into a small number of appealing clichés, and through its ubiquity turning every public social interaction into a performance of them.

To be clear, lots of the social media content produced about Ireland online is not only harmless, but good: it’s much more common to see Ireland and Irish attitudes represented in media now than it was when I was younger, because the barriers to entry were high and now they’re all but non-existent. None of the cultural tics I have mentioned above are fake social media creations either, and all of it represents aspects of the Irish story which would and did exist in the absence of social media. People have been complaining about loudmouth yank tourists my whole life and I would expect to continue if the internet was unplugged tomorrow, same with Irish interest in a certain international conflict I won’t name.

On the other hand, facts that don’t fit the narrative - like (picking things more or less at random) the overtly ethno-religious nature of a lot of historic Irish nationalism, Feminist icon Countess Constance Markievicz’s sincere Catholicism, the Irish public support for Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war and the long history of Irish anti-communism generally - these are parts of Irish life and history that I never see reflected back to me in social media's magic mirror. The algorithm has bred them out of the story in the same way unappealing but natural irregularities are bred out of a commercial foodstuff: in order to create an ultra-processed product for the enjoyment of deadened taste buds at home and abroad. Speaking of which - enough of this auld politics and culture rubbish - how about another pint of Guinness?