Online trends virality is a poor test of whether a cultural phenomenon has legs, according to Ruby Thelot, a New York University cyber-ethnographer and media-theory researcher. In an interview with WIRED, Thelot argued that high view counts increasingly measure a platform’s capacity to distribute content, and its creators’ capacity to chase that distribution, rather than broad and durable public uptake.
The distinction matters for anyone trying to decide whether an unfamiliar phrase, aesthetic, product or argument has actually escaped its feed. A thing can be repeatedly served to one set of users, become meaningful within that group, and still fail to become a lasting cross-cultural trend. Those are three different events. The internet has made them easy to confuse.
How can you tell if an online trend is real?
Thelot’s answer is less a measurement system than a corrective to treating the counter as an oracle. Look beyond a burst of engagement: Does the phenomenon turn up in distinct communities? Does it remain present after the initial spike? Does it carry social meaning beyond the fact that people watched it? Those questions are a synthesis of his argument, not a validated checklist.
He describes the contemporary internet as divided into “digital islands,” where apparent virality can happen among particular communities rather than across a mass public. In that account, the feed can create the impression of ubiquity through repeated exposure. Plenty of people may see something. That does not establish that they adopted it, cared about it, or will remember it next month.
Thelot applies Goodhart’s law to the problem: once a measure becomes the target, it loses value as a measure. Views and virality, he told WIRED, may once have been useful rough signals of cultural relevance. But creators and media companies can now construct content around the goal of accumulating views. The result can be engineered virality without the kind of value Thelot associates with cultural staying power.
That is not an argument that every fast-moving online phenomenon is fake, nor that engagement data is useless. It is an argument against treating one platform’s numbers as a referendum from the whole culture. The supplied evidence does not establish a universal metric that separates a durable trend from a temporary one.
Why do online trends still pull people in?
Social trends do not need to become universal to matter to participants. National Geographic reported in 2024 that psychologist Pamela B. Rutledge links trend-following to social connection and affiliation. The behavior can signal membership in a group, or a desire to join one. Social platforms have also allowed trends to travel faster and farther, while micro-trends can rise and disappear within weeks, the publication reported.
That context sharpens Thelot’s point. A niche trend can be socially real inside a community while being wrongly sold as a society-wide movement. The more useful reading is to separate algorithmic exposure, community-level uptake and durable adoption, then resist letting a view counter collapse them into the same thing.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
