Four things every university student should do less frequently: eating Cookout after midnight, taking the elevator to the second floor of a building, waiting until the last pair of underwear is gone before doing laundry, and scrolling through BuzzFeed.
We’ve all fallen into the well-crafted trap that is BuzzFeed. We decide we need a minute of Facebook scrolling to ease the pain of organic chemistry. One click leads to another, and before we can get out of the trap, we find ourselves knee-deep in “19 ways you know you’re not the youngest person at the bar anymore.” Some time passes, and we are still submerged in numbered lists upon numbered lists of “ways to tell” and “signs that you.”
Only the sound of our phone, the rumble of our stomach or maybe, just maybe, the faint whisper of consciousness can call us back to reality. We close the browsing window and return to life.
It may seem harmless and almost therapeutic, but there is so little to be gained from reading (what I reluctantly call) an article from BuzzFeed. There’s no substance, no original thought, no value to “15 pictures that prove necks are the sexiest part of a man.”
In the last 24 months, BuzzFeed has tripled its monthly views from 4.3 million to 19.3 million, according to Forbes magazine.
BuzzFeed is so successful, because it fits perfectly into the apathetic lifestyles we, as privileged university students (yes, all of us are privileged to some degree), are so susceptible to adopt. With the extent of institution-driven thinking we must do, it is too easy to feel we deserve to spend some time doing mindless Internet surfing. We feel we deserve to let our minds sit as we aimlessly scroll through “21 reasons Taylor Swift would actually make a wonderful girlfriend.” This sort of idleness, however, is less than ideal.
The problem goes deeper than the superficiality of BuzzFeed’s articles. The root of the problem I have with BuzzFeed is the majority of us realize it fails to engage or provoke thought, and yet it continues to grow at an alarming rate.
BuzzFeed writers use articles such as “25 ways to tell you’re a kid of the ‘90s” to trigger feelings of nostalgia to capture readers. From there, readers will end up reading about “27 of the most important Jheri curls in history” of their own free will.
The oversimplified lists target a wide spectrum of people with titles suggesting only a certain crowd will understand the information that is about to be presented. We look at these titles and feel that because this list applies to us, we are special and have an understanding that others could never comprehend because they simply weren’t there.
It’s a lie and a trap. The people who create these lists were probably born well before the 1990s and who has never experienced half the things he or she lists. And again, I would venture to say that most of us know this and continue to entertain the BuzzFeed industry because we are too apathetic to do anything else.
Let it be clear, rest may replenish the mind, but idleness does not. If rest is what we desire when we begin to read “51 facts you probably didn’t know about One Tree Hill,” it would be of much greater benefit to simply close one’s eyes and reflect on whatever it is that rocks our boat at that moment. This would at least require some semblance of original thought, introspection and reflection.
The Pew Research Center reported that 23 percent of people living in the U.S. did not read a single book in 2013. I understand that it would be silly of me to ask an audience of university students to read more books; that’s certainly out of the question. But would it be too much to ask that we close the BuzzFeed website and entertain ourselves with any other type of engaging literature? Or a puzzle? Or a few minutes of meditation? Or a jog around campus? Or a quick Google search of what is going on in Antarctica?
Worse than being ignorant of the fact that BuzzFeed articles don’t actually offer anything more than a couple of gifs and memes, is being aware and feeling we are entitled to engage. Perpetuating this ideal will lead to a generation that reads only when it’s told it must and is not only unable but, more importantly, unwilling to engage in thoughtful process.
If we are to keep our brains from turning into idle muck balls of needless lists, it is necessary we engage ourselves in the one thing no one else can offer us, original thought.