academic.oup.com
In Germany, the current outbreak of mass social media-induced illness is initiated by a ‘virtual’ index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.
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patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.
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Notes -
If there really is a social contagion spread in this fashion...why would you tell people about it?
The meme can't infect you if you identify it as cringe.
This is, ostensibly, the whole point of edgy jokes and ironic bigotry. It exposes you to the meme in it's crippled, cringey form, innoculating you against later infection.
I do not think that is the whole point.
A lot of social games are played around the concept of the line, where e.g., you might demonstrate your social competence by walking right up to the line and just barely not crossing it. Maybe that's what we call a really good edgy joke? Or, if you don't know where the line is, you might deliberately cross it order to identify exactly where it is. I suppose that'd be a bad edgy joke. Although, a skillfully made line-crossing can plausibly be walked back to where the line is, after you've identified its location. And of course you might cross it just to make people mad. You might not even mean what you say, you just wanna piss them off and you know that crossing this line is the way to do it.
There's lots of others, like how ambiguous statements can be used to gauge mutual trust and friendship, e.g., you insult your friend and he chooses to interpret it as insincere as a display of trust. Which of course is dangerous, since the insult could be sincere, and he could end up looking or being played for a fool and suffer the negative social consequences of that. Or how groups can use offensive jokes or statements in order to forge similar bonds between themselves. And not just in the sense of saying offensive things insincerely and then being interpreted insincerely by fellow group-members, but also to say such things in order to deliberately make yourself less tolerable to others, and the more strongly you advertise social signals that make you intolerable to others, the more strongly you simultaneously signal your dedication to the group. "I am so dedicated that I am willing to forgo all other social relations, and I demonstrate this by making everyone else hate me to the point where this group is my only option." Although, that probably is not a positive aspect.
Anyway. This wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list (nor am I qualified to provide one), just to remark that there's a lot more to edgy jokes and general line-crossing than merely cleverer variations of saying that something is bad. There's lots of playing around with identifying what is bad, and with dancing around a shared understanding of something as bad in order to achieve different effects.
I feel like a lot of these points are intuitively very obvious (just look at people interacting socially, they engage in these strategies constantly and effortlessly with high levels of competence) but are rarely verbally articulated for some reason. Probably, I'm guessing, because they are so obvious and intuitive. But, then, this also makes them sometimes invisible in the verbal space. Makes me think of, although it's not quite the same, of how historians seem to be still very unsure about how e.g., roman legionaries actually fought when their line met the enemy, because nobody bothered to write that part down. They wrote lots of other important stuff down, just not that part. It was so obvious to them that there was no need to. So it's invisible to us, who are just seeing their writings. Maybe there's a danger in spending too much time in verbal spaces, like the internet, or highly formal places, like the workplace, where these social games are a lot more dangerous, and so they're played a lot less, and so people end up inexperienced with them. But I digress.
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