This is vague and unclear. I have no evidence for many of the things I am going to say. I am going almost entirely off of anecdotes and observations. But fuck it, I still believe this so strongly that I can't help but write something about it.
The Internet is amazing at spreading the most godforsaken fucking slang in the world. Rizz, mewing, gooning, oh my god, I'm killing myself immediately for writing this. But something more interesting is the spreading of specific vocabulary choices and phrases. Certain words can suddenly start "trending", and quietly influence someone's speaking and writing. Here's the Google search trend graph for "red flag", one of my favorite examples:
I noticed one day I kept hearing it, and it just never stopped. I have a counter in my head for when a conversation about relationships devolves into mentioning red flags. In fact, there's a lot of relationship ones. This is the one for "toxic relationship":
(Honestly, this post could be renamed the Redditification of the Internet with how high of a suspect it is for causing some of these language trends.)
Language affects thought, which affects perception. Once the words are in the forefront of someone's mind, they're more readily applied to a situation and viewed through the lens of that word. When "red flag" started spreading, so did "green flag". Good or bad relationship actions can now be cleanly organized into one of those two boxes. Every now and then, an action would be categorized as a "gray flag", which indicates either only a mildly worrying behavior or fully neutral behavior. But "gray flag" never became as popular as the other two. This is the definition of black and white thinking. It is a way to frame relationships as clearly good or clearly bad. If the language available to describe a situation only lets someone describe the black and white of it, this becomes the only way to think of situations.
"Esoteric" is another one of my prime examples of language spread. From what I can tell with sheer observational power, it started circling around smaller, nerd-infested Internet spheres first (imageboards and Fedi took a pretty good liking to it). Then, it hit normie spheres, and the nerds NOTICED. And they did NOT like it. Usage of it in nerd spheres started dying pretty fast, and out came this meme:
While the rise and fall of "esoteric" doesn't have as much of influence on thoughts, it still makes an interesting case as to the potential lifespan of language trends. People loved "esoteric" specifically because it was niche and no one else was using it. Normies using the term felt disgusting and slimy. Now a random techbro YouTuber who only knew JavaScript was saying "esoteric" in reference to little known JavaScript libraries, and then your professor was saying it and you hated that bitch, and now it's lost all coolness. And so that meme is a response to it losing coolness and nicheness, which is ironic because even this shitposter doesn't seem to be using it in its original sense at all. We want no one to use it or know it again! But that's not possible, because that's how the Internet spreads language. This is basically the equivalent of being mad that your favorite band became popular and then became lame.
I'm going to take a poorly transitioned detour here to talk about self harm and how the Internet may potentially be creating a script for people to follow when self-harming.
A few things to keep in mind before getting into the self-harm segment:
1. No study seems to agree on anything related to self harm. There is barely any consistency in rates of self harm globally, let alone within certain subsets of the population. I have looked through many, many studies attempting to gather more info, and it is exceptionally hard to find clear, consistent info. Lots of studies seem to have different and unrepresentative samples, which may explain why numbers are so different from study to study.
2. Several studies either conflate self-harm and suicidality, or swing wildly the other way and completely separate them. The general consensus is that self-harm is done without suicidal intent, but self-harmers have a much higher chance of attempting suicide.
3. There are massive gender differences when it comes to self-harm. Females tend to do it in higher rates and are more likely to choose to cut instead of other methods.
4. This problem is rapidly changing and evolving. Self-harming behavior just keeps getting worse and worse with time. In other words, any slightly out of date study may have numbers that are completely off by now. See the below graph, taken from here:
A large majority of people choose to self harm by cutting. Here is a study with some information on the location of cutting. In the study sample (people admitted to the hospital for self-harm in the UK), 30% of cutting occurs on the wrist, 24% on the forearm, and 33% on the upper arm. The remaining 13% is spread across the rest of the body.
What percent of self-harmers are cutting themselves rather than using other methods? It seems to be about 70%. If 70% of self-harmers are doing it by cutting, and 87% of those are cutting their arm specifically, that means that roughly 61% of self-harmers are specifically self-harming by cutting their arm.
The most depicted method of self harm is the most common - even the Wikipedia page has a picture of healed-over cuts on the arm. People will sometimes talk about their cutting problem rather than their self-harm problem, synonymizing their meanings. Almost all media depictions of self harm are of cutting. The problem is that the arms, especially the wrists, are an extremely dangerous area to cut relative to other areas of the body, mainly due to the risk of nicking the radial artery.
At least all social media platforms forbid the glorification of self harm and are on top of removing posts related to it.
...Fuck.
