Tick the Talk: The rise of the rant.
Expressing your emotions, delivering a monologue of frustration, complaining, ranting, venting (not the among us one) — are things we’re guilty of doing everyday but we try not to because let’s face it — who even wants to hear us rant and go on and on about something that they already know about.
You’ll be surprised to know millions of them do.
How can our frustration be converted into content?
How to draw that fine line between being nagging and being relatable?
What unites us all together is the problems that we share, things we can all associate to as a community, stuff that appeals to us as well as a whole bunch of other people and connects us together.
We can choose to express it in several ways — either by writing a heartfelt note about it or by making a video where we shove down our frustration into a 2-minute monologue or have a heart-to-heart talk with our virtual audience as if it’s a regular conversation between 2 friends or just any form of art — but all of them with one thing in common — to strike a chord with a mass audience.
Think Naveen Polishetty’s earnest monologue in AIB’s honest engineering placements about the reality of engineering which had one of the best scripts I’ve come across mainly because it touched upon so many points that something every engineer in India could resonate with which ultimately turned Naveen Polishetty into a household name.
Or
Excerpts and notes about what this pandemic really feels like that I alone could’ve sent to 10 people at least who found the entire post comforting and empathizing because they could connect with all the experiences and feelings penned down in the post.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CN2ivUeh0Q4/
@homegirlabouttown on Instagram captures all of our emotions during the second wave of Covid aptly in this post
But this style of content where the creator / influencer really puts themselves out there — their opinions, their thoughts, has only risen to the ranks of its contenders off-late and why might that be?
Content like this was always actually present throughout the internet, after all isn’t that the point of Twitter itself — to have an opinion and to express it, but now they’ve become immensely popular, branching out into a different avenue itself of dealing with problems that aren’t necessarily all serious or grave but at the same time something everyone can relate to.
Something all of us face but found it trivial enough to express our opinions about it — enter rant-style videos, which have evolved into a different type of content in themselves thanks to the introduction of short-form content introduced by Tiktok and pushed aggressively to viewers on Instagram with reels.
15–30 seconds which is the current time limit of Instagram reels is the perfect length to hold the attention span of Gen-Z netizens and to rant about issues — be it universal problems or seemingly trivial ones. And the important bit is the influencer/creator gets to put his/her take and opinions on that issue so the façade of being a celebrity on a virtual platform drops and it seems more like a friend of yours expressing his/her opinion.
Adding to this is the bonus of being able to interact with your audience with ease, to hold conversations in the comment section with the audience expressing their take on the same thing.
Such content involves emotions and not just text because it’s someone filming themselves and this makes it raw and consumable. At the same time, it needs lesser investment than a full-fledged video because its nothing over 30 seconds really so content for this is easier to churn out — clearly it’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Content like this has made the creators more transparent as well (not literally of course, (in that case Mr. India would’ve topped the list), more of a person that the audience can all connect with — a “mood” like Niharika NM’s followers prefer to call her as.
I can watch Reels of content creators talking about several issues for hours — ranging from unsolicited aunty opinions in weddings to Kangana’s tweets and expressing the range of emotions and thoughts that most of us, if not all go through often exaggerating them (which is the icing on the cake of course) for a comedic effect, sort of like observational comedy like Vishnu Kaushal aptly said and that’s really the best part about them — that they use humor as an effective tool, even a bit of self-deprecating humor sometimes, weaving it into rants and making us all laugh at our own problems — and at the end of the day that’s really what we all want right?