DISCUSSION REPORT #2
OMG CAPITALISM, SCHIZOPHRENIA, AND BUZZFEED
BY ARIA SANYA
Declaration of Integrity:
I, Aria Sanya affirm that my writing is original and that I did not use artificial intelligence of any kind, plagiarism, nor the help of ghostwriters to generate any sort of content for this report. I understand that the consequences of doing so are severe and also embarrassing.
In last week’s lecture, “City & Community”, we learned from Jane Jacobs that “cities are, by definition, full of strangers” (1961, pp.39-40). We also learned about the idea of Techno$chaft: a post-industrial society where “wealth is based on the capacity to get, understand, and use information” (Phillips, 2010, p.180). How can we relate these concepts of urbanization breeding anonymity and technology fuelling wealth?
“The Future of BuzzFeed: Win or LOL?” and “BuzzFeed News, Which Dragged Media into the Digital Age, Shuts Down” display the rise and fall of BuzzFeed’s news division that shut down in 2023. These articles recount BuzzFeed—an online site known for publishing articles reflecting social media and pop culture—’s venture into traditional journalism, its attempts to stay afloat, and its eventual dissolution. In the latter article, Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson outline how BuzzFeed began relying on advertising to subsidize the addition of their news division saying that BuzzFeed, “capitalized on the growing dominance of tech platforms” (2023). The article quotes the CEO of a digital media company called Skift, who says, “News organizations risked becoming obsolete if they didn’t focus on multiple ways to make money” (Mullin & Robertson, 2023).
In “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, Jonah Peretti, the co-founder of BuzzFeed, argues that the emergence of online shopping, as an extension of capitalism, has “accelerate[d] the rate in which subjects assume identities” (1996). He continues that, “identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume” (Peretti, 1996). The creation of internet shopping and the prevalence of visual media has allowed people to rapidly develop different identities by purchasing products that align with their changing identities while also inviting consumerism, as customers can buy products with only a click of a button. It seems, in this article, that Peretti is critiquing capitalism as contributing to societal inequalities. Many years later, BuzzFeed’s shift to using digital advertisements in sponsored “listicles” and affiliate links to fund their News division seems to embody the patterns that Peretti observed and once critiqued.
In “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, Louis Wirth builds upon the idea of cities as a place where strangers coexist, and suggests that because people are not able to fully understand each others’ personalities, relationships between people are “segmentalized” and can be used to explain the “‘schizoid’ character of urban personality” (1938). People play different roles within a dense urban environment: “an increase in numbers when area is held constant...tends to produce differentiation and specialization” and we attribute them with what they do to benefit us (Wirth, 1938). The person who brushes elbows with you could be your neighbor, your employer, or your bodega man. This is also applicable to the importance of commerce, and the city as a tool to accelerate capitalism; capitalism inspires competition, specialization, and “mutual exploitation” (Wirth, 1938). Within the city, fragmentation is happening not only across the urban society, but also across the urban economy, developing its “schizoid” personality.
Finally, within the context of the digital age, people can become further separated. Technology can encourage isolation; instead of going to a market or shop to buy food, why not just order online? Thus, the urban and the internet are both means of rapid identity fragmentation and creation. Digital advertising encourages a similar anti-social consumerism. In a postindustrial society where wealth may be based on the ability to gather and use information, accelerated through the internet, how do we navigate news from platforms like BuzzFeed, who focus on sensationalism but also rely on advertising to keep afloat? Money creates bias but is also necessary for media to be disseminated. These are only some of the paradoxes that color modern urban issues.