So I log on to Facebook to distract myself from the minimal studying I need to do at this time of year and start to scroll through my news feed.
The Ten Things Miley Cyrus Looked Like at the VMA’s… Don’t care. 50 Million Things That Existed in the 90s… Don’t care. Paintings of Disney Princesses Next to Cute Animals While Somebody Lights Themselves on Fire While Twerking… Close, but still don’t really care.
I don’t claim to be a snob about the media I consume; I like mindless bullshit as much as anybody else, but I’m suffocating. I’m being strangled by a slew of posts of BuzzFeed articles and I don’t like it.
I get that our generation lives off of lists, something I admired and even thought was cool when I saw High Fidelity for the first time, but at some point the context of the lists has to have some sort of depth; there has to be meaning.
To prove my point, I just now (literally, this second) went to buzzfeed.com. The featured article is titled “23 Couples Who Are Cute Even Though They Root for Rival Teams.” Reluctantly, I just decided to click on the article.
The description of the article states:
“You’ve found the love of your life. Too bad he/she loves the worst team in the history of sports. But there’s hope. Just heed the methods of the couples below who’ve found ways to be faithful to both their teams and each other.”
How…uh…precious? Via: buzzfeed.com
Under the description are 23 ways couples that consider loyalty to rival sports teams an actual problem can resolve said issue. These include:
- Watch a sunset together
- Go to the Big Game
- Go to a wildly under-attended game
- Stick your tongues out at each other
- Smile while strangling one another
- Threaten to punch each other, then apologize
- Scream into each others’ mouths…
First off, anybody can go watch a sunset together.
Secondly, the last three examples are perfect examples of what a volatile relationship looks like. Threaten to punch each other, then apologize? Scream into each others’ mouths? Smile while strangling one another? If this is the kind of behavior BuzzFeed is promoting, not only is it obnoxious, ubiquitous, ridiculous and any other negative “ous” you can think of, it’s detrimental to how we as humans interact with each other. If BuzzFeed is the kind of publication that thinks domestic violence is acceptable because a UF lad and an FSU lady don’t agree about a football game, then it’s dangerous for so many of us to be reading it, let alone reposting it all over social media.
I’m not sure if BuzzFeed is a mad scientist’s evil plan to dumb down the population of the world (I’m willing to bet Plankton’s trying to popularize the Chum Bucket out of this somehow) or if our generation is just so over stimulated by nonsense, but it needs to be stopped. Sure there are worthwhile posts on the site, I’ll give it it’s due, but the overwhelming majority of articles that get reposted are worthless. I don’t need to read “20 Reasons You Know You’re (Insert Whatever Here)” to know who I am.
So, please, feel free to enjoy whatever you’d like on the Internet. Feel free to waste your time, hell, tag your friends in a post and waste their time too.
Just don’t be upset you missed out on life because you were hypnotized by BuzzFeed.
Photo courtesy of: RightSpeak.com
