TikTok Quote Dumps: The Girlies Are Web Weaving Again
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If you have thumbed through a TikTok carousel containing sentimental poetry extracts; pensive, screenshotted quotes from Tumblr or a captioned Robin Williams’ movie still and felt overcome by emotion, you’ve been algorithmically struck by a web weaving. Web weaving is the latest content archetype to be resurrected from the Tumblr archive and reshaped for the aesthetic tastes of a new subculture audience.
Emulating the manual intertwining of traditional weaving; web weavings brings together snippets of poetry, online content and fiction exploring the same theme or emotion. Pieced-together content about anxiety, loneliness and the rest of life's difficult, inexpressible emotional states is warming our hearts, bringing a bit of tenderness to our monotonous social feeds. As we navigate a post-capitalist, neoliberal hellscape that enforces individuality; stripping our relationships of real meaning and leaving us emotionally starved, web weavings have been given a new utility, enabling us to not only emotionally connect with ourselves again, but also our friends.
TikTok is the contemporary nerve centre for online youth culture, but it borrows heavily from platforms of the past and this re-emerging desire to curate and aggregate content in order to feel something has roots within a bygone social media era. With origins in the pixelated web2 fuzz of the 2010s, web weaving was part of the digital furniture of Tumblr. In this former digital life, web weaving served a more introspective purpose, as users explored deeply personal, yet universal, feelings of anxiety and depression through visual means. Encapsulating emotions through a captioned Skins GIF paired with a VSCO-edited image of a tear-stained, handwritten piece of poetry was a cathartic ritual for most users.
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The TikTok carousel feature has birthed a new structure for contemporary web weaving, as users curate together up to 35 screenshots of art and poetry of a similar theme, paired with a contemplative, dream pop soundtrack or a piano-driven, introspective harmony. When caught in a mindless scroll, web weaving holds your attention, providing a burst of concentrated emotion in an aching pang of nostalgia, loss or love. The addictive, emotional recompense we gain from this content, paired with the hyper-vigilant TikTok algorithm creates the perfect breeding ground for web weavings to multiply.
Our humanity compels us to share and converse with others; a biological desire that has been progressively flattened by individualism. Recent online discourse lays bare the shifting dynamics of our friendships, as they increasingly become transactional and forgo a sense of community, mutual trust and love. As parameters of platonic relationships become more narrow and self-orientated, online therapeutic discourse has risen – fed to us through TikTok therapists and pseudo-science wellness coaches on Instagram Reels.
Whilst these accounts can provide valuable access to therapy that many can’t afford, a portion of these creators promote a warped, ‘therapy speak’ version of therapy, laced with buzzwords and jargon faking the appearance of actual psychological knowledge. Discussions of hyper-emotional literacy insidiously lurk in online spaces, helping to cement an emotional ceiling in our friendships and regulating conversations within the safe confines of surface-level palatability. To avoid ‘trauma dumping’, or ‘exceeding someone’s emotional capacity’, we have thrown balance out of the window, establishing emotionally destitute friendships that are deprived of connection and mutual aid.
Web weaving not only disrupts the emotional detachment we can feel forces onto our friendships by the internet. The seemingly flippant, passive act of sharing a cute slideshow of emotionally loaded quotes with a friend is anything but, as the content itself shoves our feelings to the forefront of the conversation. We can connect from a safe distance; sharing emotions in a detached, open-when-you’re-ready kind of way.
As more of our communication happens through social media channels, it’s only natural we begin communicating through the content we are constantly exposed to on these platforms. We are already engaging in this new visual language, sending memes to friends we know they will enjoy with no contextual message to accompany the image. In the evolving dynamic between ourselves and online content, we increasingly use what we see as a springboard or vehicle for conversation, instead of initiating dialogue ourselves.
“A shared web weaving packs an emotional sucker punch, shoving love in the face of a friend from the safe, sterile environment of a screen”
Sharing web weavings is the next step in this direction, a turn towards image sharing that isn’t purely humour-based: the content has more emotional weight to it. Just as meme-sharing provides someone with an inward laugh or a satisfied smile, web weavings allow us to share a vulnerable moment together whilst apart, creating emotional intimacy through the devices that helped erode it in the first place. In a way, web weaving can feel quite radical, however, this line of thought can only go so far when we realise we are re-establishing emotional connectivity in a detached, abstract and roundabout way.
A shared web weaving packs an emotional sucker punch, shoving love in the face of a friend from the safe, sterile environment of a screen, often as we lay in bed late at night, facing our fears as we scroll through algorithmically delivered slideshows dissecting our feelings.
From the tens of thousands of shared videos received, and lovey-dovey comment sections brimming with tagged friends, teary-eyed emojis and strings of hearts, we are clearly sharing these little digital love bombs with the people closest to our hearts. Discussing our emotions shouldn’t need to come with a warning, however, this form of communication can’t be perceived as being pushy, intrusive, or overstepping boundaries, since it is masked in enough kitschy internet language and hashtags to soften the sender's intentions. Whilst intimate moments between friends should always be cherished, the most enriching friendships require a lot more work than detached DMing. As with all digital communications, hopefully, this new mode of emoting can provide a gateway to further IRL conversation and bonding, to get us back to a place of platonic intimacy we so desperately crave post-pandemic.
Words: Emma Quin