BuzzFeed Quizzes

The inspiration for this blog came from our discussion about Facebook and people constantly comparing themselves to others. It's about forming personal identity and the sources that some people use to accomplish this.

Due to my dedicated study of the social media site Facebook (dedicated study...occasional addiction...who's to say?), I've noticed an increasing trend: BuzzFeed quizzes. What State Do You Actually Belong In? Which One Direction Member Should You Marry? What Hunger Games/Harry Potter/Parks and Rec/The Office/Lord of the Rings Character Are You? Just take your pick of topic that you want to know about yourself, and there's bound to be a BuzzFeed quiz for it.

My first reaction to this new Facebook epidemic was humor and excitement. I took my fair share of quizzes. Not to brag, but I'm Katniss Everdeen and Harry Potter, I would dominate the Hunger Games, I should live in Virginia apparently, and I should marry Harry Styles (I'm not even that big of a fan of One Direction...why did I take this quiz?). Those are just a few of my results; don't worry, I've taken many more quizzes. After this initial entertainment, I became annoyed at seeing these quizzes and people posting their results all over my news feed. My second level of annoyance came in the fact that I couldn't stop taking the quizzes. My addiction had grown, risen, and formed a new, interactive, result-providing platform.

Instead of ignoring the quizzes completely, I let my pop culture analysis side kick in and look at them in a different light. I realized these quizzes, while commonly used for fun and entertainment, are also providing a way for people to make comparisons and form opinions and new outlooks on themselves. It's another example of how people use outside sources, especially the Internet, to decide their identity. My concern stems from people's inability to simply be themselves, discover themselves, and create themselves. They have to see how they compare to someone else (whether that's comparing themselves to other Facebook friends' results or comparing themselves to fictional characters they may have gotten as results). At a point, I just got frustrated and thought to myself, Why do people need the Internet to tell them IF THEY'RE COOL OR NOT? (In case you wondered, I got: "straddling the line between cool and uncool." :/ Yeah, I took this quiz too...for blog analysis.)

On one hand, I think that BuzzFeed quizzes are a fun way to interact with pop culture, but I also think that, in this manner at a point, it becomes a harmful interaction. Maybe I'm overreacting on this, but I just can't write this notion off completely.