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."

Comments

Caring about news and politics instead of trivial

[cyber-vandal]

How incredibly snobby to give a shit about what's going on in the world and how your country's being run rather than hur hur look at da crazy cat. The human race is filed.

Re:The French are the world's Standards Board

[TechyImmigrant]

When I was working in the UK at a wireless product design company, the American CEO of the American corporation that just purchased the company flew in to talk to us. We were all gathered in a big room. In his rambling talk, he referred to all the black people in the room as 'African Americans'.

Stupidity is not reserved for one nation alone.

I hate imperative headlines that address "you"

[wonkey_monkey]

Blame America For Everything You Hate About "Internet Culture"

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Re:that's because

[war4peace]

It's not about countries, it's about cultures.
Some cultures (e.g. Western European culture) favor more serious subjects versus others. Some others (e.g. Northern American) favor lighter subjects (unwind-type). Asian cultures apparently favor explosive feeling-related and augmentative headlines ("It's SUPER effective!"; "AMAZING performance!").

Nobody's to blame, really, except companies not doing their homeworks and trying to vomit their own culture-specific successes over other cultures and promptly failing.