On second reading, the title of this post makes it sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Which it isn’t. As you may have noticed.
What it actually is, is a petty, self-important and somewhat pompous observation of modern life. (What’s new?) To be more specific, it is an observation of a particular essence of modern life that I find more and more prevalent in my own daily discourse, and, I am sure, the daily discourse of much of my generation.
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that those employed in a vocational role involving sitting at a computer all day, must be suffering a severe addiction to BuzzFeed. Just in case you are one of the saved-souls not familiar with BuzzFeed, it is a website of mindless, useless, but incredibly enticingly-packaged information, the sole purpose of which is to distract you from any meaningful task in life, and to entrap you in an endless circle of ‘Ooo look, celebrity instagrams…oooo look, a quiz that will finally reveal to me which member of One Direction I have the most in common with… ooo look, dogs anthropomorphised into a numbered-ranking of which is having the least fun in a bathtub…’ and so on, until whatever you were doing before you stumbled onto the site seems like a distant concept from a galaxy far, far away, and you have no hope whatsoever of recovering it. I am ashamed to say, there have been occasions whereby one moment I am working away, typing up an important e-mail, or writing an equally pressing piece of copy, and the next thing I know, I’m scrolling through ’38 Guinea Pigs Who Look Just Like Michael Cera’, with absolutely no recollection as to how that might have happened; no memory of having exited Outlook, opened up my internet browser and lazily typed a single ‘b’ into the address bar.
You may be thinking, ‘why are you now talking about BuzzFeed?’ and you would have a point. Perhaps I have lost my mind and BuzzFeed is now all I can think about… Thankfully though, I also have a point, and it is this: from my constant trudging through BuzzFeed’s vacuous, but undeniably amusing warren of fluffy brightly-coloured media, I have discovered a curious and strange rhetoric that has, regrettably, slipped into my own everyday discourse.
The rhetoric is very hard to describe, and so I will attempt to do so padded heavily with examples (despite the risk of the examples themselves dragging your attention away from my blog and back onto the website in question). Basically, what I am trying to describe is the general feeling that pervades the vast majority of BuzzFeed posts, of hugely hyperbolic essence – taking semiotic colloquialisms to their absolute extreme, with the intention to amuse. My first example to illustrate this is genuinely the very first post I was greeted with when venturing bravely onto BuzzFeed just now: The 26 Most Hilarious and Shocking Moments in Literary History. As we can see, this is in fact nothing more than a list of pictures that vaguely relate to books. Really, the post should be called ’26 Pictures Featuring Books or Things that Relate to Books’. And yet, these pictures are re-packaged by BuzzFeed as the most hilarious and shocking of the entire breadth of literary history. Starting to see what I mean?
This theme is continued in example two: 23 People Who Literally ‘Just Can’t’ This is a list of GIFs and video clips of everyday, slightly awkward and unfortunate situations, (most of which were artificially created for entertainment purposes), but instead of being called ’23 People Who are Finding the Trivia of Daily Life a Bit Stressful’ e.g. number 5 who encounters a spare-seat on a busy train, annoyingly occupied by a woman’s bag, or ’23 People Who are a bit Over-Excited’ e.g. number 12, whose roller-coaster ride has caused his face to be contorted into a slightly strange expression, BuzzFeed has re-branded it ‘people who just can’t‘. People whose frustrations are so inconceivable, that they don’t even have the energy to form a grammatically correct description of how they feel; they just can’t. The hyperbole here is obvious, being a bit annoyed/irritated/excited is transformed into being enraged, to an entirely all-consuming and incredibly dramatic level.
Drama is actually key in this whole rhetoric I think. And never is the element of drama in the hyperbolic nature of BuzzFeed more apparent, than within literally ANY post featuring, or even eluding to Beyonce (or ‘Queen Bey’, as BuzzFeed assumes we all refer to her). Don’t get me wrong, it is a rare occasion when, left alone in the house, I can’t be caught warbling along to ‘Irreplaceable’, or busting out a word-perfect rendition of Jay-Z’s rap on ‘Deja Vu’, but I feel as though BuzzFeed has taken its love and worship for Beyonce to a frankly ludicrous level. Here are a few examples: Beyonce Blesses the Human Race with Another Surprise Track, (reality: Beyonce Releases Another Piece of Music, as is her Job), 16 Flawless Items You Can Buy to Pledge Allegiance to Beyonce, (reality: 16 Things You Can Waste Money on, Vaguely Related to Beyonce), and example three, The 33 Fiercest Moments from Beyonce’s Halftime Show, which features number 11 – Beyonce making an unflattering face because she was ‘so fierce it was almost painful’ and 24, where she transforms even from ‘Queen Bey’ to the holy form of ‘Beysus’, kneeling to ‘bless the audience’ with her immortal, unearthly power.
It is this kind of overblown, overstated, dramatic rhetoric that I often find has, sadly, infiltrated my own vocabulary. Despite my best efforts not to let it happen, I have been known, on more than one occasion, to utter what I have deemed ‘curtailed superlatives’, such as ‘I just can’t right now’, ‘I don’t even’ and ‘literally how?!’ The other day, I caught myself describing a three-minute YouTube video of a hamster tucking into teeny tiny burritos as ‘literally the best thing ever’, and referring to the morning I purchased a train ticket, stored it in my bag next to my wet umbrella and accordingly rendered it a soggy mess that couldn’t be posted through the barrier slot as ‘the worst thing that’s ever happened to me’.
Perhaps I am being overly critical, but the more I become aware of this discourse, the more I realise it characterises not only the way we speak, but also much larger aspects of our identities. What with the overbearing rule of social media platforms as bizarre, curtain-less windows into every corner of our lives for an ever-increasing audience, embellishing fairly banal human occurrences and opinions with the sprinkling of dramatic razzmatazz that hyperbole and superlative provide is an understandable result of having our lives and daily movements on display in this way. We feel that in order to avoid updating our facebook status or tweeting something as drudgingly workaday as ‘my internet keeps cutting in and out and I am accordingly frustrated’, we must hyperbolise and exaggerate until it becomes ‘Oh my God, internet is literally killing me. #ijustcan’trightnow’, because, otherwise, who is even going to care??
In some senses, this is nothing new. As long as humans have existed, they have exaggerated and spun dramatic tales – you only need to look at the rhapsodies and lexical fields of overblown romance/rage in any given Shakespeare play to know that doing so is not something recently introduced into the human condition. However, I do think that part of what makes the current hyperbolic zeitgeist that myself and my peers live within sit so uncomfortably with me, is perhaps that, unlike Shakespeare’s (which was born from a very English love of language) it is so entirely un-English. Obviously this only applies as a concept to those who are actually English in the first place, but luckily I am, so I may proceed.
In her anthropological text Watching the English, Kate Fox categorises us as a nation of ‘reserved, inhibited [and] privacy-obsessed’ individuals, none of which seem to echo the hyperbolic discourse and dramatic proclamations that I witness on my (granted fairly multi-cultural, but still predominantly English) Facebook/Twitter feeds.
All things considered then, we do seem to be living in an age where drama and histrionics are essential tools of social interaction. Perhaps this is a by-product of our ever-depleting privacy, as we pour more and more of even the dullest aspects of our lives into public spheres and spaces. Perhaps it is a way to decorate our personalities with attention-grabbing adornments, to gain more attention in the form of Facebook friends, Twitter followers or blog comments. Or perhaps it is just a way to add excitement to things we may otherwise let pass us by in a haze of untapped normality. Whether the hyperbole zeitgeist is a good or bad thing, or, more likely, somewhere in between, will I continue to intersperse my daily computer tasks with regular drip-feeds of ‘sassy, confident’ cats wearing tights, throwbacks to the ‘dazzlingly awe-inspiring’ fashions of the 90s, and ‘incredibly important’ celebrity instagrams of the week? I think we all know the answer to that. Imagine my life without the ridiculously overblown statements and dramatic, GIF-illustrated countdowns of BuzzFeed? I can’t even.