by Adriana Pérez / © 2024, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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In the past year, the concept of “underconsumption core” has gone viral on TikTok—the land of influencers, shopping hauls and short-lived fads. Rosie Albrecht, 26, from Chicago, has been a regular presence on the social media platform for the past five years.
[In 2023], she found her niche alongside other “deinfluencers.”
“I was shopping in Target,” [Albrecht said.] “And I was just thinking about … all these videos … of people being like, ‘Here are the things you need to get at Target!’”
Then she asked herself: “What if I made a video that was the opposite of that? Here’s me in Target, just doing my normal shopping, but instead of telling people to buy stuff, I’m talking people through why I’m not buying stuff.”
That first deinfluencing video blew up. “I was like, ‘OK, I guess I’m gonna make this my thing now,’” said Albrecht, who has over 40,000 followers.
A culture of spending
These deinfluencing and underconsumption trends present increasingly popular ways to push back against a culture of consumerism, fast fashion and overspending promoted by lifestyle influencers on social media who post videos of their latest shopping spree as packages comically pile up in the background, all carrying brand names to promote.
Many young social media users try to keep up with these lavish, but mostly unattainable, levels of consumption. Others worry about the environmental impacts as unrecyclable, cheap products get dumped in landfills.
Google searches for this term surged by 1,150% in the two weeks after it went viral on TikTok, according to digital marketing firm Webbee.
Whether this virality can sustain a long-term movement toward environmentally friendly consumer behavior remains to be seen, according to Curtis Puryear, a computational social scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University who studies the intersection of social media and moral values or beliefs.
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