Rachel del Valle | What's all the buzz about?

Last weekend, I signed up for a class on Herman Melville for the spring semester because I realized that, if I didn’t, it was unlikely that I’d ever read “Moby Dick.” I see a great many things in my future come graduation, but summoning the internal motivation to read a 2,000-page book about a whale isn’t one of those things.

It’s been a while since I read a book cover to cover. More often than not, I start with good intentions and end up skimming, guiltily. The decades-old question of who has time to read anymore seems appropriate here. It seems that, especially on a college campus, reading for pleasure has become a rare activity. I can’t help but feel that there’s a particular collegiate elusiveness when it comes to getting your hands on and head around good reading material.

But all this is old news. We all know that the printed word is losing appeal in favor of snappy posts and GIFs. It’s been happening for a while now. Soon, we’ll all just regress to hieroglyphics.

I’m not one to fetishize the physical book over, say, a poem, or an article. But reading something — anything — both thoughtfully and just for kicks, is harder than it sounds.

Most things read on the computer are peppered with bings and zaps notifying you of emails and instant messages. Anything read in the library is done with the end goal of a blog post or paper or impending class in mind. But what about the undistracted feeling of reading something you want to read? Is that really such a luxury, or do we just treat it like one?

I suppose I could blame BuzzFeed for hooking a generation to the GIF and text list format. Quality content becomes secondary to the catchy idea. But that seems like an easy answer — there must be something more to the nuggetizing of literature.

Despite all my skepticism and snark, I’m just like any other twentysomething in the target demographic.

I’m honestly unable to explain why I continue to jump at the links that come up in my Facebook news feed. I know that no matter how promising the title is, I’ll be entertained for a minute or so, at best. Nothing will resonate, I probably won’t laugh. Best-case scenario, I’ll feel cheaply amused for a short period.

The pull to click on a given link that screams with personal relevance is, frankly, scary. (How can I not read “23 Signs You Went to An All-Girls School” or “21 Reasons It’s Awesome to Have Your Sister as Your Best Friend?”). These things speak to me — I have to at least listen to what they’re saying. But that sense of connection that I feel is really little more than a blip on a screen, a cleverly strung together combination of keywords.

With that low baseline of commitment and expectations, it makes sense that BuzzFeed has become the international source of mediocre internet content that it is today.

But I can’t complain every time I get to the end of a post and feel unsatisfied — it’s not like I paid to read it or gave it much more attention than a billboard.

I recently went to a bookstore and picked up a copy of Gloria Steinem’s early writings. It’s a hardcover from the 1980s that I made a choice to purchase. I have slightly higher expectations for that than a list of GIFs and vague captions — you get what you pay for, after all.

Similar sites for millennials that operate on a quantity over quality approach to content make me wish I could dissociate myself from everyone born after 1990. Thought Catalog, which focuses on more sentimental list-making, and Elite Daily, which goes for a more edgy approach to Generation Y matters, are internet trainwrecks. They’re so bad, but once I’m there, I can’t stop looking. Or clicking. Or feeling annoyed.

The whack-a-mole-like proliferation of flimsy websites like these make me wonder what exactly will happen to longer pieces of writing that aim for insight instead of instant gratification. Reading something substantial is only a big deal if you make it one. Just because certain websites brand themselves as voices of our generation doesn’t mean we have to read them.

Rachel del Valle is a College senior from Newark, N.J. Her email address is rdel@sas.upenn.edu. Follow her @rachelsdelvalle. “Duly Noted” appears every Tuesday.

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