“The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of Ten Best.” —H. Allen Smith.
The listicle — that staple of 2010s digital journalism — was often maligned, not least by other journalists. The format was decried as lazy, on the part of both publishers and consumers, in an age of shortening attention spans; as a killer of “real journalism,” and as “pseudo-journalism that has become a drain on our collective intelligence”; as emblematic of an era defined by vacuous, money-grabbing clickbait. In 2017, Lake Superior State University in Michigan proposed to ban the term “listicle” itself, as part of an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.” (The irony was not lost on the authors.) The Oxford English Dictionary notes that usage of the word is still “frequently disparaging.”
These days, listicles feel like a relic of a different online age — one of scale-chasing and peppy social virality; of BuzzFeed (perhaps the pioneer of the listicle) and Upworthy — that has been superseded by today’s fractured web. They are often remembered not as journalism, or even good content, but as trash, engineered to entice users to click on a link while scrolling Facebook (something young people once did), stay on the page for as long as possible, and, preferably, share it on with family and friends. (Listicle-adjacent concepts included “listflation,” or the idea of stretching listicles to ever greater numbers of items, and the “demolisticle,” a piece of content targeted at a niche audience — Berkeley grads, say, or children of Irish parents — but primed for sharing among the communities that saw themselves represented.) As I see it, though, listicles deserve to be remembered more favorably — and may not be dead yet. Here are seven reasons why, because of course.