Online culture hits the streets, from catching Pokémon to aura farming

In some cities, public squares and parks are once again filling up with teenagers. Their gatherings, baffling to anyone outside the generation fluent in memes and TikTok, have dominated headlines over the past few weeks.

Everyone is trying to explain what “aura farming” means. The concept is associated with video games (farming means repeatedly performing tasks to collect in games) and is used to describe earning social credibility through performative acts that are funny, stylish or absurd enough to attract attention, both online and in person. And people are also trying to understand why scenes that may seem absurd at first glance are, in fact, deeply connected to the way a generation of digital natives builds community.

But this story goes back much further. Over the past two decades, the internet has steadily moved its codes from the screen onto the streets. We have gone from displaying who we are on social media to shaping our identities through it.

It’s impossible to think that what happens online is separate from physical reality, argues Adrián Juste, an analyst at the Spanish think tank Al Descubierto. The psychologist recalls that the first virtual communities — which emerged in the early 2000s, in forums and blogs that didn’t use algorithms — aimed to find people with shared interests to build relationships in the real world. Ultimately, what happens on these platforms happens in real life and vice versa.

The first signs of digital trends becoming symbols of collectivity emerged with flash mobs. These events began as social experiments, bringing together large groups of people to perform coordinated actions. Later came trends like planking and “owling,” in which participants had to strike a specific pose in an unexpected location and be photographed. The Harlem Shake saw entire groups of people become the stars of frenetic choreographies. And, a decade ago, Pokémon Go did something even more radical: it transformed the streets, parks and monuments of real cities into video game settings.

The fundamental difference between these pioneering phenomena and today’s aura farming is the speed at which these trends appear, transform and expand. It now feels like every so often, a new trend emerges without a clear origin, even though the same phenomenon has repeated itself countless times, with each generation adopting its own version. However, the trends of the last decade didn’t require an understanding of the diverse contexts of digital culture in order to be enjoyed.

Yet even though social media has invaded virtually every corner of daily life (including the bathroom, where people spend a lot of time on their phones), it is impossible for users to keep up with every language, reference and code circulating online.

That is especially true when algorithms increasingly tailor content to specific audiences. In this case, children and teenagers. This is a generation that has grown up with technology as an almost natural extension of themselves. The idea that young people build both individual and collective identities through the language of social media should not come as a surprise. Especially when the latest trend, so-called “aura farming battles,” adds a layer to personality development: it’s a way of presenting yourself to others through a game.

Learning to look the part

The idea that our identity is also constructed through our actions isn’t new. More than half a century ago, sociologist Erving Goffman used the metaphor of theater to explain how people present different versions of themselves to others, depending on the “act” that they’re in. Sociologist Iago Moreno says that the use of social media as a “showcase for life” has led new generations to adopt more stylized gestures than ever before when they’re in front of a camera. “Now teenagers perform them by imitating memes and a whole system of [online] references,” he says.

Philologist Byron Ramírez explains that these references or customs are sustained by a shared irony that leads to a kind of game: “This dynamic functions as an excuse that allows for collectivity within the generation, for public activities to be articulated around a common reference point, such as the internet, that vast territory that unites them.”

Ramírez describes the use of absurdity as a way of coexisting and transmitting ideas. “In [aura] battles, everyone wants to represent an amplified, almost caricatured version of the attitude that they want to project, a cooler version of themselves.”

This performance of identity through gestures and contexts understood by one’s peers has always existed, Adrián Juste argues. “We’ve all had our own language and codes, because they’re the expression of collective and individual identity during adolescence. There is a need to separate yourself from the family environment in order to create your own life project, and identity is the ultimate expression of that project,” he concludes.

Every generation, he says, adapts that impulse to its own reality through shared references: catchphrases, imitation of cultural idols, fashion choices and urban tribes such as emos and punks.

For Juste, the fact that news headlines are now filled with stories of teenagers practicing aura farming reflects a paternalistic desire to explain a trend that was never designed for adults in the first place.

Moreno adds that the only thing that should matter is that young people are becoming increasingly expressive within their own cultural codes, at a time when previous generations were beginning to internalize the fear of being filmed and exposed online.

The key to understanding these scenes is not asking what teenagers are doing in public parks, but where the rules of the game they are playing come from. For years, the internet was described as a parallel reality accessed through a screen. For those who grew up with the web as a central part of life, however, that boundary does not exist. The codes of social media don’t stay confined to platforms. They become part of language, clothing, gestures and the ways people relate to one another.

Young people are bringing into public spaces what they first built through screens: communities, characters, jokes and shared codes. If the internet once served to connect people separated by distance, it now helps connect people standing right next to one another. The difference is that no one logs on and off anymore. The public square has become an extension of the web.

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