A critical essay examining how short-form video platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok are accelerating the erosion of regional identities, with Kashmir as the backdrop.  

The essay dissects how these platforms flatten language, gesture, and identity into reproducible, depthless tropes. Drawing on theorists like Baudrillard (hyperreality) and Bourdieu (cultural capital), I argue that the “Reelocene” epoch—a term I coin to describe our current moment—privileges performative affect over meaning, turning even obscenity into an aesthetic commodity. From literature students who can’t spell Shakespeare but mimic viral catchphrases to influencers exoticising borrowed dialects, the essay reveals how algorithmic mimicry quietly dismantles local idiom in favour of a globalised, disposable vernacular. 

The piece balances rigorous critique with satirical bite, exposing the paradox of “viral diversity” masking homogenisation. Why do we reward those who shed their native speech for influencer cadences, yet mock others for failing to code-switch “correctly”? Why does a forced Californian “oh my god” signal clout, while a regional accent often signals lack? I trace this asymmetry to digital capitalism’s demand for frictionless content, where identity becomes a buffet of curated fragments and authenticity is measured in engagement metrics. The reel doesn’t just reflect culture; it rewrites it, one 15-second clip at a time.

This isn’t just about Kashmir, of course—it’s about how digital capitalism commodifies marginalisation. 

We are living in what might be termed, with no small irony, the “Reelocene Epoch,” a cultural moment defined by the hegemony of the short-form video. The reel, that flickering dopamine syringe, has become the dominant aesthetic form of our time, colonising attention spans with ruthless efficiency. As Jean Baudrillard might observe, we no longer consume content; we consume the spectacle of consumption itself, a fragmented, accelerated loop of imagery that demands nothing and offers even less (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation). The reel’s tyranny is absolute: lectures, prayers, even human interaction must now be compressed into digestible, forgettable morsels. In this economy of attention, brevity is not just the soul of wit, it is the death of thought.

As an educator, I perform the obligatory ritual of cautioning students against this “clip-ification” of consciousness, invoking the Frankfurt School’s fear of cultural industrialisation (Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment). Reels, I proclaim, erode analytical rigour, replacing sustained engagement with the cheap thrill of the swipe. Yet, like a hypocritical priest preaching temperance, I too am ensnared. My recent obsession? The performative expressions of actors, particularly actresses and influencers, whose exaggerated mannerisms seem less like human affect and more like semiotic ghosts haunting our collective psyche. The content is irrelevant; it is the style that seduces. As Roland Barthes noted in Mythologies, the signifier often eclipses the signified, and here, the how obliterates the what entirely.

What is most unsettling is the cultural seepage of these artificial expressions into everyday life. There is no taxonomy for their absurdity, no critical framework to dismiss them as the hollow theatrics they are. Yet, as Bourdieu (Distinction) would wryly note, the moment one fumbles with cutlery in a “decent hotel,” the cultural gatekeepers descend with their taxonomy of shame: awkward, backward, uncivilised. The irony is exquisite. We welcome the staged grimaces of influencers into our cultural lexicon without scrutiny, yet a misplaced fork becomes a moral failing. The reel, in its infinite democratisation of nonsense, has rendered us all fluent in the language of superficiality, while the old hierarchies of “taste” remain, weaponised as ever.

Let us dissect, with the precision of a Barthesian semiotician (Mythologies), the spectacle of a popular celebrity in question—a paragon of “manufactured authenticity.” Her dress, more articulate than her expressions, functioned as what Baudrillard might call a “hyperreal” costume (Simulacra and Simulation), a visual manifesto screaming “Look, but do not think!” Every strand of her hair, inflated to near-architectural grandeur, obeyed the unwritten laws of “reel aesthetics”, where naturalism is the enemy and effort is the unspoken fetish. One does not simply exist in the reel; one must perform existence itself, like a Sisyphus cursed to eternally reapply lip gloss.

The video, a mercilessly truncated snippet, was not a vessel for meaning but a shrine to how meaning is staged. The question she answered was irrelevant, mere background noise to the ballet of her lips, the calculated dilation of her pupils, the precisely calibrated flash of teeth. Here, Goffman’s “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” collapses into farce: her gestures were not communication but choreography, each movement rehearsed to mimic spontaneity. The hands moved with the eerie precision of a Victorian automaton, the smile erupted on cue, less an emotional response than a Pavlovian concession to algorithmic demand.

And oh, the laughter! A burst of sound so meticulously timed it could have been engineered by Fordist efficiency experts (cf. Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism”). The triviality of the conversation only heightened the absurdity, proof that in the reel economy, even banality must be gilded with performative ecstasy. Her tone, a surface paint, was less human speech than what Adorno would deride as “the jargon of authenticity”, a veneer of charm lacquered over the void of substance.

What we witness here is not grace, but “gracefulness”, a patented, mass-produced simulacrum of allure, designed for maximum swipe-appeal. The reel does not capture life; it replaces it with a pantomime of affect, leaving us, the viewers, both mesmerised and vaguely nauseated, like children who’ve eaten too much candy and now crave something real, only to forget and reach for another reel.

We are witnessing what Walter Benjamin might call the “mechanical reproduction of affect”, where the mannerisms of influencers, YouTubers, and actors, endlessly proliferated through the digital assembly line of reels and social media, have seeped into the groundwater of popular culture (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Their curated tones, exaggerated expressions, and sartorial hyperbole are no longer mere performance; they have become scripts, mimicked with the fervour of a cargo cult, as if adopting the right affect might conjure the same social capital. The younger generation, those unwitting disciples of the algorithm, now speak in the borrowed cadences of influencers, their gestures a patchwork of viral tics, each movement a citation, each expression a plagiarised emotion.

What’s fascinating, in a grimly Bourdieuian sense (Distinction), is how this mimicry is largely confined to a specific class, those enchanted by the spectacle of showbiz, for whom every conversation is an audition and every social interaction a potential reel. The same phrases, delivered in a different context, say, a grocery store or a government office, would sound absurd, yet in the right echo chamber, they are performed with solemn reverence. Not all these gestures are inherently malignant; some are benign, even charming. But when they morph into unrealistic, dross theatrics, a pantomime of “high society” or a fetishised dialect that screams “I do not belong here but wish I did”, they become a cultural pathology.

There is, as Zadie Smith notes, nothing wrong with linguistic multiplicity (Speaking in Tongues). But there is something grotesque about affectation, when a forced accent, an unnatural gesture, or a rehearsed laugh betrays not fluency but cultural desperation, like wearing a costume that doesn’t fit. It’s the difference between speaking another language and performing linguistic tourism, a clumsy, often cringe-inducing pantomime of belonging that only highlights the distance between the self and the desired identity. The reel, in its infinite wisdom, has turned us all into amateur method actors, forever rehearsing a role we weren’t cast in.

And so, we arrive at the great irony of digital culture: the more we imitate, the less we inhabit; the more we perform, the less we are. The reel giveth, and the reel taketh away, leaving us with a generation of expert impersonators who’ve forgotten how to simply speak.

What we are witnessing is nothing short of a Bakhtinian carnival (Rabelais and His World) gone digital, where the exaggerated movements of pupils, the performative arching of eyebrows, the ritualised baring of teeth, and even the fetishised utterance of obscenities are no longer mere expressions but cultural signifiers, meticulously curated and weaponised by the reigning class of reel aristocracy. These gestures, in isolation, are harmless, perhaps even endearing in their absurdity. But when monopolised by the influencer elite, they mutate into hegemonic codes (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks), where even vulgarity is laundered into sophistication, and crassness is rebranded as authenticity.

Consider the irony: in my own classroom, undergraduate literature students, who stumble over the spelling of Shakespeare and for whom metaphor remains as elusive as a coherent thesis statement, nevertheless wield phrases like ouch, shit, and god damn it with the precision of Orwell’s Newspeak (1984). These are not words learned semantically, through the labour of reading or the discipline of discourse; they are cultural viruses, transmitted through the algorithmic ether, bypassing cognition to lodge themselves directly in the performative subconscious.

What makes this particularly grotesque is the class dynamic at play. When the reel bourgeoisie deploys these phrases, they do so with the smug assurance of Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction, turning obscenity into a badge of cosmopolitanism, a way to signal I am above the provincial constraints of your linguistic norms. But when the same words are mimicked by those outside the cultural inner circle, they ring hollow, awkward, forced, a betrayal of native idiom in exchange for borrowed coolness. The result? A generation that can’t define synecdoche but can moan oh my god with the cadence of a Netflix teen drama.

In this post-linguistic dystopia, words are no longer tools of meaning but props in a globalised pantomime, where the more you disclaim your own language, the more you think you belong to some imagined elite. Ouch ceases to be an exclamation of pain; it becomes a performance of cultural surrender. And the reel, that great meritocratic lie, rewards only those who best erase themselves in the service of its endless, empty spectacle.

We find ourselves in the throes of what Guy Debord might diagnose as “the society of the spectacle” in its most insidious form, not through overt propaganda, but through the unconscious osmosis of reel culture’s aesthetic norms. Like Adorno’s “culture industry” (Dialectic of Enlightenment), this phenomenon does not announce its colonisation; it simply embeds itself, naturalising foreign gestures and linguistic tics until they supplant local idiom without resistance. The problem is not merely imitation, but normalisation, the quiet violence by which the imported displaces the indigenous, not through force, but through sheer ubiquity.

Expressions, as Raymond Williams reminds us (Marxism and Literature), are never merely individual acts, they are collective articulations of cultural consciousness. When a generation adopts the vocal fry of American influencers, the exaggerated gasps of K-drama reactions, or the clipped consonants of British prestige accents, not for communication, but for performative sweetness or seduction, they engage in what postcolonial theorists would call linguistic self-exoticization. Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture) might frame this as mimicry without mastery, where the borrowed dialect does not elevate but diminishes, rendering the speaker neither authentically local nor convincingly foreign, just a ventriloquist’s dummy for globalised affect.

The tragedy is not in the borrowing itself (cultures have always hybridised), but in the asymmetrical cultural economy at play. The reel era has turned language into a pick-and-mix identity buffet, where the privileged curate accents like accessories, while the marginalised shed theirs like shameful baggage.

In the end, this is not just about sounding ridiculous, it’s about sounding erased. Every exaggerated uwu or forced vocal fry isn’t just cringe; it’s a small obituary for a linguistic heritage that no longer feels worth keeping. And the algorithm, that great cultural homogeniser, rewards only those willing to auction off their dialects to the highest bidder. The reel giveth clout, and the reel taketh away dignity.

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.

You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.