Here’s a fun new game to play with the news: log on to Facebook. Find a story somebody has posted with an absolutely shocking headline. Next, try to guess what important fact the writer omitted to turn the story from something boring into a newsworthy event.
Try it!
But it gets worse. The big growth area in online media isn’t incremental reporting. It’s incremental repackaging. Three TV channels plus a local paper can pitch the same story to four segments. Buzzfeed alone manufactures new segments constantly. And of course the point of writing something Only People Who Dislike Children Will Understand is that one person who dislikes kids will share it with their kid-disliking friends. The share doesn’t mean “this is interesting.” The share means “you are one of us.” And if that’s the case, what does disagreeing mean?
It’s a weird self-created Cordyceps: we all express group affinity by saying things that make our ingroup dumber. Nobody needs to be particularly cynical; we all just need to be in a hurry. You’re going to share something if it strikes an emotional chord. And you can watch the evolution in nearly real-time by reading about a story in fairly sober publications, and then on click machines like Business Insider. (An excellent example of how the most emotionally impactful word moved from “not” in a study to “maybe” in an early headline to “Study Says” on the blogs.)
I have three cures, two of which are expensive and one of which you can’t affect, but which is the best option because it’s inevitable.
The first option is a big monetary investment. The second is a big time investment. But the third is inevitable. Facebook already explicitly demoted clickbait headlines earlier this year. But they’re not done with Upworthy yet. And Upworthy is definitely a threat to Facebook’s iron grip on the average Internet user’s idle attention. Their business model is, basically, “Notice how everyone under 30 constantly mocks people for sending sappy email forwards? Clearly sappy stories are a universal human need. Let’s trick cool kids into like them.” And it worked! Until the host’s immune system kicked in.
It’s natural to slip into biological metaphors: the term “viral” is apt because it’s a small and self-copying chunk of information. But it’s also apt because a virus can only thrive given raw material from a host, and the host has a strong incentive to stop it. If the best metaphor for a business model is something that kills people, maybe that’s not the model to bet your business on.
October 27th, 2014 at 5:15 pm
This. A million times.
Let’s make it go viral!
April 13th, 2015 at 4:08 pm
[…] Most exciting headlines are true but misleading. […]