The Internet is a fine purveyor of many things: cat videos, memes, and invitations from relatives to join their agricultural mecca in FarmVille come to mind. But the social media sites that spout listicles filed under #relatable have yet to master the proper representation of a quiet, but familiar friend: the introvert.
On Tumblr and beyond, awkward is cute, shyness is a virtue, and being an introvert is cool. Being different is the red badge of courage we wear proudly on retweets, reblogs and likes because finally someone gets us. But what happens when the cool and different you leads you to create a caricature of yourself?
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Although it's nice to have an alternate world where the unsung hero is the mascot, the social media wrought representation of the introvert is monolithic and stifling as much as it is meme-worthy and amusing.
Perhaps the following image will jog your Tumblr-fried memory: pizza-eating, people-hating, all they really want to do is binge watch Netflix at home and avoid social interaction by reading a book or pensively staring out windows.
And just like that, the introvert has been turned into one of the most pervasive memes yet.
This introvert representation is also seen in trendy Buzzfeed lists and a gif of April Ludgate expressing her hatred of people, but certainly there’s more to introversion than having a penchant for some alone time and Netflix binging. These activities, after all, are only human.
According to a TED talk by Susan Cain, author of Quiet, up to half the population consists of introverts. Contrary to popular belief, introverts do not hate people nor are they recluses or necessarily shy. One common definition of an introvert is an individual who needs to recharge after social activities or gains energy from solitude. So while a Buzzfeed listicle about the “23 things all introverts understand,” can hit it right on the mark, it can also miss the target and propagate the “I hate people” rhetoric associated with introverts. However, there’s far more to introversion than a need for solitude and introspection, these are only marks of being human.
A 2014 article in the Scientific American points out that the characteristic of recharging after social activities is not exclusive to introverts, but extroverts as well, along with other traits associated with introversion like sensitivity and introspection. Rather, according to the article, extroversion is marked by a sensitivity to social rewards and a proclivity for sociability, whereas introversion is well, the opposite. There’s no one-sized fits all version of extroversion or introversion. In fact, a recent New York Magazine article says that there are four different kinds of introversion: social, thinking, anxious and restrained.
What the Internet gets wrong about the introvert and what we introverts get wrong about ourselves stems from the lack of a cohesive definition of the adjectives and nouns we define ourselves by. Introvert, extrovert, ambivert, we’re all meme-worthy and like a nice old-fashioned Netflix binge. We’re bonded by our mutual -vert's, sometimes the prefix is irrelevant.
