My Favorite Parts Of The 2021 Internet

In this week's newsletter: 🎶I ain't never been with a baddie 🎶, Vodka and Scotch TikTok, and Viola Davis and her love of boomer memes.

This is an excerpt from Please Like Me, BuzzFeed News’ newsletter about how influencers are battling for your attention. You can sign up here.

This week I’ve been editing the 32 Most Defining Memes of 2021, our annual opus by Julia Reinstein (and this year cowritten with our own Ikran Dahir), and it’s made me reflect on this year of internet culture.

Instagram turned into photo dumps — dozens of carefully curated photos of and by people pretending they were not carefully curating their lives — and “adding yours” to whatever is the prompt of the day. Audio also continued to dominate, whether it was Twitter’s attempt to rip off Clubhouse with Twitter Spaces or Hinge adding an audio feature to profiles (wild) or just how certain sounds took over TikTok and our brains for weeks on end. We wanted to look expensive and not cheugy and break our story into multiple videos to make sure everyone followed us.

Each person lives on their own internet — with their own communities, interests, memes, influencers, and aesthetics — and so I wanted to share some of my personal faves from my 2021 internet with you:

And before you light the sparklers and pop the champagne to welcome in 2022, please take a moment to fill out our reader survey. We’ve been reading all the responses so far and have loved learning about your thoughts for Please Like Me moving forward.

Happy New Year,

Amber

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