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Blame America For Everything You Hate About "Internet Culture"
An anonymous reader writes If you hate cat videos, personality quizzes, and endless list stories about a specific school or region, then you should blame the USA according to this story. From the article: "'In France, articles about cats do not work,' Buzzfeed's Scott Lamb told Le Figaro, a leading Parisian paper. Instead, he explained, Buzzfeed's first year in the country has shown it that 'the French love sharing news and politics on social networks – in short, pretty serious stuff.' This is interesting for two reasons: first, as conclusive proof that the French are irredeemable snobs; second, as a crack in the glossy, understudied facade of what we commonly call 'Internet culture.'....American audiences love animals and 'light content,' Lamb said, but readers in other countries have reacted differently. Germans were skeptical of the site's feel-good frivolity, he said, and some Australians were outright 'hostile.' Meanwhile, in France — land of la mode and le Michelin — critics immediately complained, right at Buzzfeed's French launch, that the articles were too fluffy and poorly translated. Instead, Buzzfeed quickly found that readers were more likely to share articles about news, politics and regional identity, particularly in relation to the loved/hated Paris, than they were to share the site's other fare."
Funny but the Germans aren't tactful either but we generally respect them while we have nothing but contempt for the French. The reason is that most of the German arrogance is actually warranted. The French arrogance isn't.
Americans respect Germans because they're very different (but that respect doesn't go very far since they still have bases in Germany 70 years after WW2). The French are very much like the Americans. This is an unconfortable truth, and so the love-hate relationship goes on since the late eighteen hundreds.
A Frenchman is an unrealised American. And the same is true on the other side, an intellectual American (yes yes they do exist) is very frenchlike. Had France kept its empire it would bullying the world as easy as the Americans have done since the end of WW2. Don't believe those that say that the French hate America. Frenchmen look to America and it reminds them of the French Grandeur that's never coming back.