A professor from the University of Southern California (USC) said he believes BuzzFeed could have a future in scholarly writing.
BuzzFeed is a news and media website with a well-known platform that generally follows the list style of articles. It often covers less-serious subjects such as music or television.
USC English professor Mark Marino said in an email BuzzFeed could be the future of academic writing. He said he believes it has many qualities for its outreach as well as it can be fun.
“I like its reach—it’s where an enormous number of people spend/waste/use their time on the Internet. Also, unlike some of my colleagues, I tend to be a bit more ecumenical or maybe agnostic about writing modes,” Marino said.
“Maybe it’s also that BuzzFeed strikes me as more playful than lurid, and I’ll always appreciate the help figuring out which Game of Thrones character I am.”
He said this can be beneficial to students because of the way it expresses information.
“To teach you must present ideas in a way that provokes thought. In my teaching, I use a lot of humor and rely heavily on counter-intuitive propositions. As a writing teacher, I’m also interested in helping students express themselves in contemporary (and classic) realms of discourse, from essays to Snapchat,” Marino said.
Marino said what he would like to do is have an education branch of BuzzFeed that would allow for it to keep its classic humour but focus on serious academic issues.
Marino currently uses BuzzFeed in his classes primarily for quizzes. He said he believes these new directions in media can help people be more informed.
For example, he said he believes that a Twitter retweet is the purest form of peer review.
Carleton University English professor Donald Beecher said in an email he found the idea of using BuzzFeed for academia amusing.
“Folks proposing to become writers need information sources, and a plug in to hip, so BuzzFeed looks like rich magma,” Beecher said.
Beecher said BuzzFeed can be whatever the writer makes of it, meaning there is the possibility to turn it to an academic site.
“How it transforms itself is the artist’s creative take on world data,” Beecher said.
However, Beecher is still critical of the site, and said it is mainly a gossip website disguised to look like journalism. Despite this, he said he still believes in a more positive future for BuzzFeed.
“At least pastiches made up of news pastiches from more serious journalism might have promise,” Beecher said.
