The internet economy is largely driven by clicks. The quality of information is no longer important as it once was in the pre-internet age. The way modern media outlets grab attention is through sensationalism. That is, to design the titles of the news stories in such a way, so as to generate the maximum amount of excitement in their audiences. The more emotionally loaded the headlines, the more likely people are to click.
Another way to grab attention was discovered by the entrepreneur Steve Rayson, who looked at 100 million articles published in 2017. He tried to find the most common phrases in the most shared articles.
The most successful headlines don’t convey facts, they promise an emotional experience. The most common phrases among successful Facebook headlines include “will make you”, “will break your heart”, “will make you fall in love”, “will make you look twice” or “will make you gasp in surprise.” This also works on Twitter. Others include “make you cry”, “give you goosebumps.” and “melt your heart.”
Intellectual experiences can’t compete. This is a huge shift in the way we consume media. In the early days of news media, headlines simply tried to give you the essence of the story “Men Walk on Moon. Astronauts Land on Plain; Collect Rocks, Plant Flag.”
But modern news outlets, because of pressures to remain relevant and profitable, have emulated sites like Buzzfeed, in the way they announce their articles.
The Washington Post proclaims, “One-Fifth of This Occupation Has a Serious Drinking Problem,” “How to Evade the Leading Cause of Death in the United States,” CNN promises to inform you. “Iceland Used to Be the Hottest Tourism Destination. What Happened?” asks USA Today. (So as not to leave you in suspense: lawyers; don’t get in a car accident; and nobody knows.)
The printing press allowed for a variety of books to emerge. Cable TV allowed people to customize their experience. And before 1987, the Fairness Doctrine of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to ensure balanced coverage of controversial issues on the news.
But Ronald Reagan repealed it. And with the introduction of 24-hour news cycles, cable news channels proliferated and became more partisan. Algorithms make things worse. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms use algorithms to find relevant posts and stories. But these algorithms don’t want to keep you informed, they just want you to stay active on the platform. They feed you more of what you want to hear, which makes you more biased.
Social media also helps spread misinformation – false claims not deliberately meant to deceive. The first to break the news gets most of the traffic so publishers skip fact checking. The Onion launched a new website, Clickhole.com, that parodied clickbait websites like Upworthy and BuzzFeeed.
Social media sites have promised to take technical measures, and ad blockers have affected the clickbait model, as more websites have moved towards native advertising and sponsored advertising. But it is unlikely that click bait will ever disappear. It is far too easy, and far too profitable, to create clickbait titles, and to use it for scams of various kinds, often directed at children.
But the problems of mass communication did not begin with the internet.
In the age of television, writers such as Neil Postman were already warning about the dawn of an era where reason and logic would be abandoned.
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Robert MacNeil, the executive editor and co-anchor of he “MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour”, a popular TV show that ran from 1975 to 1983, writes that the idea is “to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required … to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.”
He goes on to say that the assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.”
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
There is nothing Orwellian about this situation, the president does not control the press, the New York Times is not Pravda, and the Associated Press is not Tass. There is no Newspeak. Lies have not been defined as truth, or truth as lies. What has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and has become amuse into indifference. Aldous Huxley would have been less surprised by this story – he prophesied its coming.
The result is that each generation unknowingly competes for the prize of being the most entertained and least informed people in history. Of course, we may have opinions about events happening in different parts of the world, but our opinions mostly consist of emotions and repeated narratives rather than a nuanced understanding of the historical context of these events.
The point of the media is shock and awe. because that is what they are incentivized to do. And none of this is a problem, if it wasn’t for the fact, that this constant stream of disinformation, each hour of every day, has a real effect on people’s brains and quality of life.
Rather than seek to be informed, people become addicted to more fast-food bites of bad information that they can share with others. It is the path of least resistance. The more people are caught by this trap, the more powerful the effect of disinformation. Therefore, there is an increasing number of people with a distorted picture of reality and a deteriorating, confused mind.
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