Is Going Viral the Same As Being Seen?
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Overview
One of my most viral moments on the Internet began while I was sitting on my sofa trying to relax. Of all the genres I listen to, I had put on some bossa nova when suddenly a Toyota Corolla flew past my house blasting something completely different. It was loud, fast, full of bass, the kind of song I’d also have in my music library, but in that moment the contrast felt so dramatic. I couldn’t stop thinking about how funny it was. I started imagining what two songs could capture that feeling and, eventually, cut together Lisa Ono’s rendition of the bolero “Bésame Mucho,” the sound of a car speeding by, and Tokischa’s “Delincuente.” I filmed myself looking out of the window and wrote on screen, “Me trying to romanticize my life but a Corolla full of girls passes by.”
The sound had a slow start. Nothing that made me sit there refreshing my phone or obsessing over the numbers. Then my followers started tagging me in videos of other creators using it. Then celebrities started using it: Shay Mitchell, Snooki, Young Miko. Eventually, Tokischa, the Dominican star of the audio herself, used it, too. The audio had somehow traveled all the way around the Internet and returned to one of the people who made the joke possible in the first place. My audio had entered the Internet machine. I could watch it cycle and spread, but no longer really control where it went or what it became.
@vanessacsirias #POV me trying to romanticize the sunset when my past self passes by #comedy #latinasbelike ♬ original sound – Vanessa Sirias
There’s something strange about watching the Internet take something out of your hands and turn it into something much bigger than what you originally made. The Internet is supposed to be this massive hub of connection, but it’s grown so vast that the things we create can become completely disconnected from where, or who, they came from. Something I made on my sofa reached corners of the Internet I never could have imagined. All the while, I remained its quiet originator.
That distance between how far something travels and how deeply the person behind it is understood is important. Dr. Narolyn Mendez, a New York City-based clinical psychologist specializing in Latine psychology, racial identity, and culturally responsive mental health care, says the distinction between visibility and actually being seen is easy to lose online. “There’s a difference between being viral and being seen,” she says. “Being seen means that you’re really being understood.”
“The Internet is supposed to be this massive hub of connection, but it’s grown so vast that the things we create can become completely disconnected from where, or who, they came from.”
Mendez describes that kind of understanding as something mutual: You open yourself up to another person, they sit with you in that vulnerability, and there is a relationship being built on both sides. The Internet can imitate pieces of that intimacy, especially when audiences feel like they know someone because they watch them every day, but it can’t necessarily recreate it.
My audio has been used in more than 785,000 TikTok posts, and most of the people who have encountered it have probably never even heard my name. I’ve never really been upset by that. The sound was never explicitly about me. The original post was already presented in the language of a meme, almost inviting someone else to place their own experience inside of it. That is also the nature of the Internet. Things are constantly being shared, remixed, repurposed, stripped from one context and dropped into another. I don’t expect the average person scrolling TikTok to stop and investigate who originated every joke, format, sound, or trend that passes across their screen. What interested me more was watching this very small moment from my own life become almost anonymous while still somehow remaining recognizable to hundreds of thousands people online.
“There’s a difference between being viral and being seen. Being seen means that you’re really being understood.”
That is where another kind of connection begins. The people using my audio certainly didn’t suddenly know me. They understood something much smaller, but maybe also much more transferable: the shared feeling. Again and again, people placed completely different lives inside the same joke. Some used it for their neighborhoods, others for their families, relationships, travel, or whatever contrast in their own life made sense to them. It had nothing to do with the original Corolla outside my house, but I still immediately understood why the sound worked. The context changed while the emotional logic remained intact.
That kind of recognition is not the same thing as intimacy. Mendez points out that visibility itself doesn’t protect someone from feeling isolated; you can have thousands or millions of people looking at you without having anyone truly beside you. But I also don’t think connection has to be deeply personal to matter. Sometimes being seen online is as simple as encountering something that makes you think.
I know exactly what that feels like. On an Internet this big, that recognition can happen between people who know almost nothing about one another. As a creator, that kind of recognition has been especially meaningful to me when it comes to culture. So much of the content I make is rooted in Latine experiences and, even more specifically, my own context as a Nicaraguan American. When I started creating content seriously in 2020, while I was still living in Miami, I found an audience through TikTok by talking about those experiences. About a year later, BuzzFeed contacted me about moving to Los Angeles to work full time creating Latine-focused content for their channel Pero Like, where I became its first Nicaraguan-American creator. I felt incredibly proud of that because, growing up, I didn’t see very much Central American representation online or in entertainment.
“But I also don’t think connection has to be deeply personal to matter. Sometimes being seen online is as simple as encountering something that makes you think.”
As much as I love having become that person I needed for others online and in media, I’ve been careful not to equate my virality with a sense of self or personal understanding. What matters more to me is making something that lets someone recognize something specific about their culture or their own life. When I think about being seen on the Internet, that is the experience I care about creating. It is less about millions of strangers seeing my face and more about one person seeing a detail of their own life reflected somewhere they didn’t expect to find it.
Growing up, I was often the person searching for that recognition myself. My earliest relationship with the Internet was through music. I would spend hours on YouTube looking for performances, backstage clips, old interviews, or strange little videos of Beyoncé, Paramore, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Selena, and especially Shakira. One of the first CDs I ever bought was by Shakira. I was a singer, too, so in high school I even uploaded covers from my bedroom, which thankfully are no longer online. Long before I had any concept of being a creator professionally, I was using the Internet to search for people who made me feel like there was somewhere for the things I loved.
Creating online also changes your relationship with the Internet. Once social media became my job, I stopped scrolling the same way. I’m still a person looking for entertainment, but I’m also analyzing everything. I’m thinking, Why did this video work? What is the hook? What are people responding to? What is changing in the culture?
The comments can affect me, too. I think it would be naive for me, or probably any creator, to pretend otherwise. If someone walked past you on the street and said something cruel directly to your face, you would probably feel something. The fact that the comment is coming through a screen doesn’t make you stop being human. I try to remember that negativity can be a very loud minority. There can be hundreds or thousands of people who enjoy what you make and say nothing, while the handful of people who dislike you are the ones determined to make sure you know it.
Mendez says that one of the psychological challenges of becoming highly visible is learning where your public identity ends and your private one begins. “You have to figure out, ‘How do I give to my audience and become viral, and what do I keep for myself?’” she says. “That can become a reckoning with your identity.” The Internet rewards access. The more someone shares, the more an audience can feel like it knows them, and the easier it can become for strangers to feel entitled to parts of a person that were never actually offered to them. According to Mendez, this is why it’s so important to have people who knew you before the visibility and can remind you who you are outside of followers, views, comments, and whatever version of yourself performs best online.
“The more someone shares, the more an audience can feel like it knows them, and the easier it can become for strangers to feel entitled to parts of a person that were never actually offered to them.”
I’ve been lucky to have both kinds of people in my life. When I moved from Miami to Los Angeles, I found a community of Latine creators who understood the very specific changes I was going through. I had never lived away from my family before, and suddenly I was across the country, working in content full time, navigating a new city and a career that was happening in public. At the same time, some of the people who ground me most are completely outside of that world. My husband and my mom are not creators. When the Internet feels enormous, they remind me, without even trying to, that it isn’t the (or even my) entire world.
That is part of why I have never wanted to tie my sense of self too closely to virality. The “Bésame Mucho”-and-“Delincuente” sound is the most viral thing I have ever made, but it did not transform my life in the way people sometimes assume a viral moment will. There wasn’t some enormous financial payoff, and I didn’t wake up the next day with a completely different career. And that didn’t disappoint me. I didn’t create the sound expecting any of these things. Mostly, I thought it was incredible to watch something I made become part of Internet culture and see how creatively other people interpreted it.
@vanessacsirias Grabamos el video musical de Si me ves en León, Nicaragua #latinas #nicaragua #latinosbelike 🎥@Fotograma ♬ original sound – Vanessa Sirias
There is, however, a disconnect between how visible a piece of content can become and what happens to the creator behind it. It reveals something about the way the Internet values creative work. There is a missed opportunity when the industries benefiting from Internet culture don’t look more closely at the people creating it. Creators shape music, fashion, language, humor, beauty, and the way brands themselves learn to communicate online. We aren’t only “influencers.” If a creator repeatedly makes things that people want to imitate, remix, quote, or participate in, there is intelligence behind that, even when the original idea looks effortless. Maybe industry recognition should not simply mean putting that creator’s username in the caption after something goes viral. Maybe it means asking who made the thing, what they understood about culture that allowed it to travel so far, and whether that person belongs in the room when you’re deciding how to reach the same audience. Brands, media companies, music labels, and other institutions have the resources to pay attention to who is actually shaping the culture they are constantly trying to participate in.
“I spent so much of my younger life searching the Internet for pieces of myself, my interests, my culture, and the person I wanted to become. Now I get to make things that might give somebody else that feeling. “
Recently, I was invited to walk with Shakira in Miami, and I brought my mom with me. I cried, obviously. I kept thinking about the younger version of myself obsessively searching YouTube for every Shakira clip I could find and about how strange it was that my life had somehow circled back to that person. I’ve also started creating and sharing my own music, which feels like another kind of homecoming because that was what first made me want to put myself on the Internet at all.
After all these years online, I don’t think virality and being seen have to be complete opposites, but I also know they don’t mean the same thing. Going viral tells you that something connected. It does not tell you what kind of connection it created. Sometimes people are connecting with you. Sometimes they are connecting with a version of themselves they found inside something you made.
I spent so much of my younger life searching the Internet for pieces of myself, my interests, my culture, and the person I wanted to become. Now I get to make things that might give somebody else that feeling. If I make something specifically Nicaraguan and another Nicaraguan recognizes their family in it, or I make a joke from my sofa that somehow gives hundreds of thousands of people a way to describe something in their own lives, there is a kind of recognition happening there that matters to me. They may not fully know me, but for a moment, something I created tells them, I know that feeling, too. And maybe, on an Internet this big, that is its own way of being seen.
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