If Andy Rooney were alive today, he’d spend “a few minutes” complaining about click-bait headlines.
_______
Doesn’t click-bait make you sick? You know, those outrageous, often hideously offensive headlines explicitly written to grab your attention with a glimpse of something you really don’t want to see but just can’t turn away from, like a traffic accident with serious carnage, the plumber’s hairy half-moon rising over the waistband of his jeans, or reality television? Even the name, click-bait, suggests this stuff is the slimy worm of the World Wide Web, coiled carefully over a sharp hook to tempt your tastebuds before reeling you in.
The aim of click-bait is to create “viral” content, exposing millions to something either sick and twisted or too good to be true, which they in turn share with millions more. Was it Freud who said insanity is contagious? No, I think it was Yossarian in Catch 22. In any case, I’m having no part of it.
It’s all Greek to me, though. Ethos, Pathos, Logos, all for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall.
|
I don’t have time to worry whether my headline is Upworthy-worthy or tasty enough to be fed to Buzzfeed, or to use that headline analyzer thing. Apparently Upworthy even makes up words and everybody is just “wondtacular” with it. Now that is power. Thank God they’re using it for good and not for evil.
Me? I like to write what I write and let the clicks fall where they may. But now the powers that be are telling me I have to change my tune. It’s all about pageviews, and clickthroughs, and rankings, and traffic. I always thought an algorithm was cousin to the chimpanzee. And SEO? Isn’t that the first half of a band called Speedwagon?
But here’s the thing. Even here at The Good Men Project we’ve lured in readers with a headline that makes you wonder WHAT WILL HAPPEN next, but doesn’t actually tell you: Two Young Women Went on a Canoe Trip. What They Caught on Video Will Stun You. What did they catch? Big Foot? Nessie? A 12-foot long leech? No, ladies and gentlemen, it was birds. Lots and lots of birds. And the murmurations of those starlings are still murmurating through cyberspace. Wait, is “murmurating” a word, or did I just make it up? So, okay, I admit they were majestic. And even I was a little stunned. But let’s be honest here, we were all hoping for proof that Elvis is still alive, sunning himself on a Canadian lake somewhere, provided by two young women in a canoe.
Just when I’m starting to feel bad about all of it, here comes The New Yorker, the bastion of no bombast, the standard-bearer of sans sizzle, the granddaddy of dignified DEKs, turning its HED and crossing over to the dark side with “THE SIX THINGS THAT MAKE STORIES GO VIRAL WILL AMAZE, AND MAYBE INFURIATE, YOU.” Harold Ross and William Shawn must be turning over in their graves, under their understated, self-deprecating, grammatically correct, humble headstones.
“The Talk of the Town” was the only nod The New Yorker gave to the notion that the chattering classes might trade tidbits over dry martinis and stale breadsticks—news of a new theatrical production, a pop art retrospective, or a celebrity’s obsession with hand-knit socks, homemade bread, or Horatio Alger. Anything more would have been, in Shawn’s words, “the end of The New Yorker.” Of course, you’d expect them to take a sophisticated crack at click-bait, skillfully weaving a Stanford grad student, a Greek philosopher, and some Latin terminology into the tale.
It’s all Greek to me, though. Ethos, Pathos, Logos, all for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall. Replace rhetoricians with “online content creators,” and you’ve got a bunch of rhetoricians reading the help-wanted ads. The Stanford guy even conducted a study that led to a startling conclusion: an article’s success depends on how positive its message is and how much it excites a reader, and that framing negative news in a positive light works wonders. Did we really need a study to tell us that “I WAS ONLY WITH HER FOR ONE NIGHT,” plays better than “I SLEPT WITH YOUR SISTER”?
♦◊♦
I found the six things mentioned in The New Yorker article more infuriating than amazing, mostly because I didn’t understand them. I get emotion and arousal. Well, I don’t get too much arousal anymore. But “social currency”? Is that like Bitcoin or the fake money people use on Facebook? And a “memory-inducing trigger”? My memory of Trigger induces nostalgia for Roy Rogers.
While emotion and arousal still top the list, a few additional factors seem to make a big difference. First, he told me, you need to create social currency—something that makes people feel that they’re not only smart but in the know. “Memes like LOLcats, I think, are a perfect example of social currency, an insider culture or handshake,” Berger told me. “Your ability to pass it on and riff on it shows that you understand. It’s the ultimate, subtle insider signal: I know without yelling that I know. When your mom sees an LOLcat, she has no idea what it is.”
…
The presence of a memory-inducing trigger is also important. We share what we’re thinking about—and we think about the things we can remember. This facet of sharing helps explain the appeal of list-type stories (which I wrote about in detail last month), as well as stories that stick in your mind because they are bizarre. Lists also get shared because of another feature that Berger often finds successful: the promise of practical value.
Now “the promise of practical value”? That I get. But I don’t get it from headlines. I get it from the copy in my Sears catalog, where it says “Six pairs for $5.99.” The last factor they mention is the quality of the article itself. I suppose there’s such a thing as quality garbage. I remember my father buying a ton of “clean black dirt” for our farm. But a litter of cat stories just doesn’t scratch that special spot under my chin. I have a cat. Two, in fact. But my cats lead pretty boring lives, and I certainly don’t want to read about them, not even for a LOL, whatever that is. The story concludes with the truism that if you keep peddling shock value—or shlock value—it eventually becomes less shocking. Honestly, how shocking is that?
So sure, I can do the math on 88 MILLION HITS Means You Won’t Want to Miss This One, 27 THINGS Mass Murderers Have in Common, 14 YEAR-OLD GIVES CEO Advice That Saves Billions, 11 COMMON LIES Parents Fall for From Teenagers, and THE ONE SURE-FIRE WAY to Have Sex on the FIRST DATE. Spare me the numbers and the numbing noise of all caps. Here’s my shot at click-bait. THE END IS NIGH: 13 Reasons Why Click-Bait Headlines Will Lead to the Apocalypse. I can write that because I’ve been through three apocalypses in my lifetime, and I can tell you, they’re not that bad.
And by the way, I missed the conference call on how to create “viral” content. So please, don’t go sharing this article with all your Facebook friends and Twitter acquaintances. Don’t like it or thumbs up it or G-whiz it or pin it to your terrace, whatever that means. Just read it and move on. I BEG YOU, PLEASE, DON’T LET THIS ONE GO VIRAL.
—–
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
I’d re-tweet this… or like it on facebook, or tell my friends about but it would only ENCOURAGE you bastards. 😉