We’ve all laughed at the lists. We’ve all taken the personality quizzes. We’ve all shared the videos. But why, when and how did an online pop culture haven become so central to our Internet personas?
BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a New Yorker who obviously wasn’t satisfied with only co-founding The Huffington Post. He left The Huffington Post to devote his time to the website that calls itself a “social news and entertainment company.” He helped expand the site when it became the first news outlet to report John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney’s bid for office in 2012. But do any of us read BuzzFeed to learn about old, white men giving each other money? How many of us actually check out the “News” tab on the website’s homepage? How many of us even knew there was a ”News” tab on the website’s homepage?
Instead, we flock to BuzzFeed for the lists of things that “only people from Orange County will understand,” in which each item on the list is accompanied by a fun GIF, of course. Especially now, with many of us so far away from home, we love to know that our sense of California community is only a few clicks away.
We can share the videos that we relate to, like “The Jewish Food Taste Test,” in which a handful of non-Jews experience Gefilte fish and kugel for the first time. Our generation is the most interconnected in history, and we love to exploit this privilege. We like to feel connected to our peers, so when Rosh Hashanah rolls around, we count the number of times that video appears on our News Feeds.
The personality quizzes range from “Can You Even Adult?” (answer: How are you even alive?) to “What is Your Inner Potato?” (answer: baked potato). The questions don’t make any sense — how does choosing a picture of Beyoncé relate in any way to the question of where I should actually be living? And yet we love these quizzes. They are somehow always accurate and simultaneously satisfy curiosities we never knew we had.
And then there are the articles with a self-deprecating sense of humor, like the video “Coffee Expert Reviews Pumpkin Spice Lattes,” because isn’t there a bit of basic white girl in all of us? If you didn’t rejoice when Starbucks announced the early return of its famous autumn beverage, then you’re lying to yourself. But even in the depths of our unconditional love for the PSL, we have to acknowledge that it isn’t exactly “good” coffee.
While we scroll quickly through the “25 Things You Didn’t Know About Harry Potter” because we totally already knew all those things, it dawns on us that we will never stop loving BuzzFeed. It provides us with compiled documentation of the most important goings on, a quick and easy way to consume pop culture. BuzzFeed gives us a way to get to know our friends better; you are what you share on Facebook, after all. So hats off to BuzzFeed for giving us one of the most effective and aesthetically pleasing way to procrastinate.
