We sit in front of our computers and are flooded with stupidity from social media sites. Your weird uncle posts what I’m sure he thinks is a popular and informed opinion about Obamacare’s death panels, that friend from high school you haven’t spoken to in years updates you with her newest bout of vaguebooking (“Ugh, I can’t do this anymore…”) and everyone else is sharing the newest “story” from BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog or the myriad other websites starting to take over the Internet.
I’m sure that there exists somewhere a name for these types of sites. They mass-produce content with the sole purpose of going viral among the most vulnerable crowds. Each day my faith in humanity constantly fluctuates between lost and restored as BuzzFeed pumps out its attractively headlined “news articles” about dolphin killings and the homeless being talented. BuzzFeed panders to everyone’s less dignified side, writing stories about how the new World Cup stadium in Qatar looks like a vagina (this was its top story in the sports section), or using hyperbole to reel in the page views with headlines like, “This Breaking Bad Alternate Ending Must Be Seen To Believed!” I feel uncomfortable reading its content, but just a little more uncomfortable not reading it.
The most shared items on these websites are usually lists that gently stroke the weird part of your ego that simultaneously makes you want to have nothing in common with people as well as share that lack of commonality with other people. “13 Things Only An Optimist Would Understand,” “25 Amazing Benefits of Living With Your Best Friend” and the classic ’90s kids lists seem to put you in an elite group among the lesser folk. But they don’t. People read them and think, “O-M-G, this is totally me!,” but they can be applied to most of Facebook. Most people I know consider themselves optimists (when they probably aren’t), live with their friends and were born in the ’90s.
Another terrible trend sweeping the net is the poorly made, in-your-face infographic that tries to be edgy by making pop culture references and using the F-word too much. Recently, the most popular one was The Oatmeal’s story about Christopher Columbus. Is the fact that Christopher Columbus was a terrible person actually news? Don’t we have this discussion every time his holiday comes up? I don’t need someone to make an obnoxious infographic to tell me that Columbus killed thousands of people with germs and steel. I felt that the author was condescending and yelled at me. It’s not well-written, and he or she tries to be “hip” by peppering in colloquialisms that just sound immature and out of place.
I know I’m dangerously close to sounding like “old-timer” curmudgeon, but this trend is scary. We’re going to be used to getting our news and information in stupid lists and poorly made graphics. TED talks, news sites and actually interesting articles are steadily falling by the wayside in place of hyperbolic headlines and insultingly uninformative infographics. BuzzFeed doesn’t give us real news. Its lists are uninteresting and unsophisticated. This needs to be stopped before all information is presented in the same format — before BuzzFeed takes over the Internet and makes us all into immature adults who’d rather relive their “’90s kid” childhood than inform themselves on real issues.