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Has our society always run on clickbait or has the internet just made the fact visible? Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's w

Has our society always run on clickbait or has the internet just made the fact visible? Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's what demons always do in the stories. They tempt. They assault the saint with powerful clickbait.

nologic01 3y ago
The immediate precursor are argubly sensationalist newspaper frontpages. Carefully chosen so as to sell the entire paper. But only tabloids would fairly consistently cross the line that distinguishes a "vivid account" of something from something borderline false. You could say that the internet, more specifically the need for "virality" engineered a race to the bottom that turned publishers into tabloid sites.
- swayvil 3y ago
  One thing about the internet is the globalness. Nothing's local anymore. All news, all advertising, is competing with a million others for your attention, instead of just a local dozen. It's like having a hundred people in your living room all the time.
anigbrowl 3y ago
No. It has always been present, but there used to be a greater respect for accuracy and knowledge, and much writing offered to inform the reader than activate their emotions ('eg just offered a revelatory view' implying that this is somehow time-sensitive news). If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count. It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.

nologic01 3y ago

The immediate precursor are argubly sensationalist newspaper frontpages. Carefully chosen so as to sell the entire paper. But only tabloids would fairly consistently cross the line that distinguishes a "vivid account" of something from something borderline false. You could say that the internet, more specifically the need for "virality" engineered a race to the bottom that turned publishers into tabloid sites.

swayvil 3y ago
One thing about the internet is the globalness. Nothing's local anymore. All news, all advertising, is competing with a million others for your attention, instead of just a local dozen. It's like having a hundred people in your living room all the time.

anigbrowl 3y ago

No. It has always been present, but there used to be a greater respect for accuracy and knowledge, and much writing offered to inform the reader than activate their emotions ('eg just offered a revelatory view' implying that this is somehow time-sensitive news). If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count. It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.