There was a time when TU sophomore Lou Reese trusted Buzzfeed to provide him with simple facts that required no critical thinking. That time is gone.
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“I remember my first Buzzfeed article, way back in 2013,” Reese reminisced. “The title was ‘Amy Poehler has The Best Response to Tom Cruise’s tweet.’ I was really impressed that they had exhaustively searched every response to Tom Cruise’s tweet and definitively determined which was the best. Those were the days.”
Reese similarly expected that the article “You Won’t Believe what this Father of 2 did” was intended to leave readers with the impression that the writer was lying.
“I got to the end and realized that, without the headline, I wouldn’t have known the story was fake,” Reese explained, somewhat teary-eyed from nostalgia. “I just kept thinking to myself, ‘I’m so gullible.’”
Reese’s disillusionment with the internet started when he came to college and discovered that his language professor didn’t actually hate a gruff-looking twenty-something in a combover.
“If that “Language Professors Hate Him” ad had lied to me, then what could I believe on the internet?” Reese shouted. “Have sociologists actually not demonstrated that 90’s kids are objectively better than the current generation? What does better even mean?
“What Reese is going through is becoming more and more common among millennials,” said White House intern Anna Lyse, who did research for the official report on millennials “10 Reasons Millennials Have It the Worst (Obama <3 the ‘90s).” “As millennials grow older, they come to realize that social media won’t fulfill the expectations they had as a child,” Lyse elaborated. “Some cope with this by relying on a Past That Never Was and pining about what cogent arguments they used to have on Facebook.” Others lose all hope. “They stare at their news feed, eyes glazed over, fingers mechanically tapping the mouse, reading with no expectation of satisfaction,” Lyse murmured in an increasingly withdrawn tone. “I believed you Buzzfeed!” Lyse finally exploded. “I thought you knew me!” Lyse did not answer any further questions, as she was rambling incoherently about the Buzzfeed listicle “20 Things only Introverts Will Get.”
