I’ve followed Joan Westenberg for awhile now, they “…publish a weekly column on technology, culture, philosophy and what it means to be a human being.” and it’s been a great read for me. Some thoughts on the attention economy really hit home:
In the attention economy, your eyeballs are the product. Media companies aren’t selling you news; they’re selling your attention to advertisers, or attempting to hook your attention to sign you up for a subscription, and at the scale they’re operating on, they need to pull out every trick in the book to get those dollars. In that twisted equation, a misleading headline that gets a million clicks is worth more than a nuanced article that gets read by a thousand people who actually give a shit. ~ Joan Westenberg
This just reminds me of when I’m trying to read news posts online; constantly getting dissed for running an ad-blocker on my computer, or dodging popup ads on my phone (yes, I need to run a better ad-block there), reading paragraph after paragraph trying to find the meat of the story. Click-bait is real and I’m always amazed at the small ammount of information they finally reveal in the last paragraph that references the click-bait title I fell for. Joan, had some more comments on that, Joan, take me away!
In their ruthless quest for clicks and attention, headline editors — and let’s be clear, it’s usually editors, not journalists — are destroying the legitimacy of the mainstream media. They’re like magicians, but instead of pulling rabbits out of hats, they’re yanking context out of stories and replacing it with shock value. These headline mutilators are perfecting the art of the bait-and-switch, serving up tantalizing hooks that barely resemble the meat of the story. It’s not just misleading — it’s manipulation, turning journalism into a carnival sideshow where spectacle eclipses substance. You might be thinking, “So what? It’s just a headline. Who cares if it’s a little over-the-top? All of us. All of us should care. Because this isn’t just about sensationalism or clever wordplay. This disconnect between headlines and content is rapidly reshaping our understanding of the world at a fucking dangerous moment in history, one click at a time. ~ Joan Westenberg The Bait and Switch Crisis