Pranks are something deeply embedded in pop culture. They are meant as a joke played on a person who, after going through a multitude of emotions like embarrassment, dismay, and surprise, will eventually be able to share a laugh. In short, they are done for the simple amusement of everyone involved. If you look up the actual definition online, you will see a lot of emphasis on the word harmless. It was a harmless prank, or a practical joke, is a usual phrase people would use to describe the action of pranking.
Most of the time, if someone wants to do a prank, the idea comes off of something they saw online. The “Flip The Camera” trend is no different. The prank is pretty self-explanatory: you are meant to find a stranger, ask them to film you with your phone, do something such as dancing, then “flip the camera” around on their face in the last few seconds of the video. The key is having the person hold your phone so the back is facing them and you can use them as a glorified selfie stick.
In concept, it sounds incredibly stupid, and not worth the effort to rant about. It appears as just another trend that teens and tweens are doing to look cool, and that’s it. That is how I felt about it at first, but I started hearing more about it, and I fell down a rabbithole of these kinds of videos. And, my god, it’s heartbreaking.
After overanalyzing these videos, I noticed that there is a common theme among them. Your usual “Flip the Camera” video will start with a stereotypical group of mean girls (or boys, I don’t judge) who do a stupid ass dance move, then flip the camera on a kid who they consider to be either weird or unattractive. Sometimes, the victim will be a school teacher, a random lady in a grocery store, or someone who is just not a kid. Or, in a few cases, they will do it on someone who is homeless. The kids making these videos pick out these specific archetypes of people to thoroughly embarrass them because they believe it is peak comedy.
The reason I brought up the idea of harmless pranks is because I have a very hard time believing that this trend is actually harmless. There has to be some sort of consequence to this trend, because it is not a prank, as much as people try to defend it. A prank requires that all parties involved have fun in the end, or at least are made aware it is a prank. In these videos, the person filming is almost always unaware what is happening until they are posted online and get global attention. Once again, this isn’t a prank. This is just bullying.
Thankfully, from what I’ve seen, there are more people criticizing the trend than actually following it. However, I also don’t agree with how people are handling it. The response most online users have to bring awareness to this trend is to just bully those people back. Calling the people who make those videos “chopped,” saying “those kids need to get beat,” or just using racist terms to defend the victims of this trend is also not okay. It is a perfectly fine and human response to get upset and angry at the kids participating in the trend, but it crosses a line when you have to insult those kids to “teach them a lesson.”
When I hear someone say that we need to bring back bullying, I lose years off of my life. Bullying has never gone away, nor will it ever stop. It is just different than when we were in elementary, middle, or even high school. Bullying is more discrete and has become so normalized that we no longer notice when it happens to us or people around us. That, and social media has created a lens where bullying can appear funny, or even trendy. If you want to be popular, you have to be a bully in some cases, and people are somehow fine with that.
It is hard to figure out how to combat bullying, especially with the youth now, when they grow up in a world where they take everything they see online and deem it as an okay thing to do. It also doesn’t help where a lot of the time they just don’t care enough to change. They see it as nothing more than passive entertainment. Though it isn’t the only way to stop it, continuing to call these people out and share our own experiences brings awareness to these situations and helps slow down the popularity of these trends.
If your response to this is either “it’s just a trend” or “it’s not that deep,” you are part of the problem. Unknowingly, you are enabling this behavior by dismissing it as kids being kids. They are kids, yes, but they have the same amount of responsibility of checking their own behavior as you do. Pretending it’s not that serious is how we got ourselves here in the first place. So, no, it’s not just a prank, or a trend. And yes, it really is that deep.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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