Content Cuts – What piques the interest of people online?
One of the recent phenomena of the 2010s has been the birth of the “clickbait” title, wherein content creators such as video publishers on YouTube or even news outlets online will sensationalize the titles of their content in order to boost the clickthrough rate of the articles that they post, be they in text or video format. While few realize this fact, it has drawn the attention of some who believe it to be dishonest or false advertising, a dangerous combination that has led to an era in which these titles have become commonplace, with people already accustomed to bite-sized punches of content fed to them on the end of a spoon during each of their online sessions.
A large part of this argument has to do with privacy and the ethics of data collection by large companies, aa many of these service providers are able to obtain information sch as the browsing habits or location of the end user in order to create targeted content that will be more relevant to them, thus boosting their clickthrough rates with that demographic further. A post by The Guardian highlights this in positing that this “highly target … advertising … is threatening our democracy”. They speak of this due to the fact that even the content that is digested by individuals of different political standpoints will be divided between them, with articles and videos that speak specifically to each individual providing them with a virtual bubble, in which they are sheltered from the facts, and only given the opinions from the side of the opposition.
As humanity goes forward in this new era of technology and information exchange, individuals have to be careful not to let the world’s largest owners and distributors of information and online content make it so that we have the smallest amount of control over the articles, entertainment, and news that we ingest.
Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/05/targeted-ads-fake-news-clickbait-surveillance-capitalism-data-mining-democracy