Who Decides the “Correct” Way to Interpret Art?
After consuming a popular piece of media, it’s common to go on social media and see everyone sharing opinions and commentary about it. What is less common is seeing a wide variety of opinions, especially when popular influencers tie morality to their interpretations. This can shut down more nuanced perspectives and leave parts of the community surrounding a piece of media increasingly single-minded.
The question is this: Does encountering the same opinions online force people to think more deeply, or does groupthink pressure fandoms to have the “correct” response?
The Pressure to Have the Right Take
With the development of the internet, there is now a community for almost everything that has ever existed. It’s easier than ever to find peers who enjoy the same things you do, but social media brings both benefits and risks. Anyone with an account can share whatever they want.
Online communities create original videos reacting to media, developing theories, connecting stories to real life, ranking characters, and debating the meaning of an ending. These posts can expose audiences to new ideas. However, they can also influence people to adopt certain conclusions before they have had the opportunity to develop their own complex interpretations.
Sharing and debating opinions online isn’t always bad, but internet culture has become less accepting of disagreement. Recently, I’ve seen many influencers discuss media in an extremely black-and-white way. Instead of forming their own opinions, some viewers simply repeat the interpretations they hear from popular TikTok creators.
I’m all for people sharing their ideas, except when commentators proclaim that their interpretation is the only correct one and label every other perspective immoral. Research has found that moralized language can intensify hostile responses on social media. Treating interpretation as a test of morality can halt deeper conversations and prevent people from growing through their interactions with art.
How Interpretation Deepens Art
In more positive cases, social media offers a variety of ideas from people who have taken the time to think carefully about the media they consume and develop thoughtful interpretations. Differing views on a piece of media can force people to confront their own beliefs, form new ones, make connections to their personal lives, or discover deeper meaning within the art. This is a more constructive and beneficial use of sharing different perspectives.
There is room for nuanced and productive discussion after people interact with a new piece of media. Just because many conversations on social media present interpretations as absolute doesn’t mean positive conversations are impossible.
Dialogues that encourage us to examine media closely allow us to connect more deeply with art. A strong relationship with art can expose us to the experiences and perspectives of others through fictional characters. Researchers have also studied possible connections between engaging with fiction and the development of empathy and social understanding. Analyzing themes, motifs, and character choices can also strengthen the way we evaluate ideas.
When Debate Becomes Competition
I believe debates about interpretation can widen our understanding of a piece of media and bring new ideas to light. Everyone has different experiences and perspectives that allow them to take different themes and meanings from the same story.
If people never shared their interpretations, groups with certain experiences could remain blind to ideas they could not recognize from their own limited perspectives. Unfortunately, people don’t always treat interpretive debates as respectfully as they should. Instead, they turn them into competitions.
The more negative forms of debate become focused on winning rather than listening to and understanding another person’s point. This serves little purpose because people simply repeat their own opinions without attempting to grasp the other person’s perspective. Thoughtful debates can be difficult to find on social media, which can perpetuate the close-mindedness already present on these platforms.
Escaping the Echo Chamber
Discussing media through original social media posts has both benefits and drawbacks. People can fall into echo chambers on short-form video platforms, where they repeatedly encounter similar perspectives. However, research suggests that echo chambers are more complicated and less universal than they are sometimes portrayed.
When different ideas are not exchanged between people with different experiences, our relationships with art can become narrower. We lose opportunities to empathize with unfamiliar perspectives and think more deeply about the themes within stories.
These conversations are not all bad, however. When people genuinely explain their opinions, listen to others, and remain open to changing their minds, they help spread new interpretations and questions about media.
Social media commentary is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Its value depends on whether people use interpretation as an invitation to think together or as another competition over who has the “correct” opinion.