Cracked: Why Lists, the "Viral" Mentality, and Buzzfeed All Suck

Kind of what I've been thinking of late.

I make a big exception for John Ekdahl's behind-enemy-lines list of passionately anti-war celebrities who have apparently been kidnapped during the Obama administration.

But most of this is just very easy content and very dumb linkbait.

There is a desperation to get clicks now, and it's apparent in the language used. It's not enough to post 14 hilarious interviews from Ellen in 2013. We have to post "14 Ellen Interviews From 2013 That Made Us Literally ROTFL."

That's a real Buzzfeed article, by the way.

This guy is so annoyed by Buzzfeed he runs a site called Buzzfeed Minus GIFs, in which he quotes Buzzfeed's actual words -- you know, minus the pictures.

For example:

18 Stages Of Getting Addicted To A New TV Show

Ok, so everybody is talking about it. Maybe I should give it a try. Download the first season. Watch the first episode. It seems nice. Watch 5 more episodes. It really is great!! Watch it nonstop for days. Download all seasons. CAN’T STOP WATCHING. Suddenly you get to the latest episode. And for now on you have to wait an entire week for the next one. You feel anxiety. The season ends and you have to wait MONTHS for the next one. The waiting. MORE anxiety. You feel empty. Lonely. But the next season starts and it’s all happiness again. And that’s how you know you’re really addicted.

Or even:

The 19 Worst Things Ever

This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This.

One book I've been talking about lately is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

The idea of the book (which, frankly, is better than the book itself) is an elaboration of Marshall McLuhan's aphorism, "the medium is a message." Which is something [I] never understood until reading this book. The aphorism stands for the proposition that every medium -- whether it be writing, speaking, song, epic poetry, telegraph reports, news journalism, or television -- has embedded deep within it a preference for certain modes of expression and certain types of stories, and thus each medium contains within it an embedded philosophy of thought which cannot be wholly separated from the actual content of the communication.

Thus, the medium itself, to an extent not appreciated enough, is part of the message it carries.

Now, Postman's book contrasts two different media, print and television. His book documents the long fall of America from a print-based method of political discourse to a television-based one. The early New England colonists, he points out, had a literacy rate of 95%, which was unheard of in the world at the time (and is rather high even today). They consumed printed material -- pamphlets, books, all of it -- and even spoke in that fashion. For example, he notes that Lincoln's speechifying, which may sound overly-complex for spoken argument today, was in fact fairly common of the style of rhetoric at the time, and people had no particular trouble following it.

Nowadays, we've lost our ear for long spoken sentences with lots of dependent clauses, and it's all we can do to make sense of them even in print, where we can take our time parsing them out.

This is part of his point: The method of communication breeds a certain method of thought in a population. To Americans living from 1730 to 1870, Lincoln's speeches were not overly-complicated or difficult to follow. They were accustomed to long complicated thoughts in political speech.

This has all changed since the television became the chief conveyance of not merely pop entertainment but, crucially, of political expression and culture itself. I will not belabor the long litany of sins he lays at the feet of television. Suffice to say that he believes that much of the superficiality and stupidity of the modern world is due to television's promotion of a certain style of thought, which is to say a certain style of thoughtlessness: Fast cuts, short sentences, information stripped of context, a disdain for abstractions -- indeed, a disdain for anything that cannot be filmed occurring in the here-and-now.

And the carnival barking-- Dear Lord, the carnival barking. Everything on TV is the best, the latest, the most spectacular, the weirdest, the most shocking. That sort of endless Hype of the Present Moment seems to give a big middle finger to All History Which Has Come Before.

Society is increasingly expressing a preference for the quickest, shallowest, most meaningless sorts of writing. It's the writing equivalent of jelly-bellies.

It's what I call the Nummification of Culture.

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we're rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. "We" -- and by we I mean Americans, not "we" meaning us here right now -- increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

...

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we're rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. "We" -- and by we I mean Americans, not "we" meaning us here right now -- increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

A horse on a couch. This has nothing to do with anything I'm writing,
but market research says that I'll lose 50% of readers at this point
if there isn't a Funny Animal Picture interrupting the text.
...

Years ago, when Titanic ruled at the box office, Hollywood began chattering: Will culture -- I mean, popular culture -- be determined by the tastes of the 16-year-old girls who turned that film into a billion-dollar bonanza by repeat viewings?

I think they rather overshot the mark. The culture is now dominated by the tastes and preferences of Tweener Girls. Or, in reality, 50 year old men and women attempting to channel their inner Tweener to appeal to a population which has decided that they were fools to have ever turned 13 at all.

You know, thirteen -- when you lost your innocence. When you stopped thinking Smurfs were All That and a Bag of Gummy Bears.

...

We are drowning in nostalgia and crushing debt and we can't see the latter because we've checked out into our Happy Place to chase the former.

I can't blame the White House or BuzzFeed for these trends. They're pushers, but they didn't create the sad addiction. This stuff works in America.

But why? Why does it work?

When did we all check out of adulthood to revert to tweenerhood? And when did we stop thinking that might be a little indulgent and shameful?

This isn't Buzzfeed's fault or anything. They are merely responding to the signals the market is sending, and the market is sending the signal "Dumb is Easy, and Easy is Holy."

Thanks to @rdbrewer4 for the horse picture.

posted by Ace at 05:17 PM

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