She Thinks Clickbait Headlines Can Be Useful — You’ll Never Believe Why!
Wikipedia is now as credible as most books, but the rest of the internet is still full of crap.
Part I: When I Saw What Was On The Weather Channel’s Homepage, It Literally Blew My Mind
I like to check the weather forecast. I like to check the national radar to see where it’s going to rain and guess how many people in the rainy areas have umbrellas. I like to see if it’s going to be nicer weather in my town or in the town where my nemesis lives. I like to plan weekend trips that I’ll never take to moderately far-away cities where the average temperature is 7 degrees pleasanter than at home.
It used to be that I could go to The Weather Channel’s website and spend dozens of minutes at a time clicking through regional monthly precipitation averages, languidly zooming in an out of live doppler maps, never having to consider whether a video of an egret being startled by a golf cart might automatically start playing and interrupt my podcast queue if I hovered for too long over a link.
It used to be that I could go to almost any website, in fact, and be reasonably certain I would see the type of content and media with which it was historically associated. It used to be that online news outlets reported stories in the same way as their tree-slaughtering counterparts, with headlines that grabbed readers’ attention by telling them the most salient points of a story rather than by daring them to test the incredulity-induced blast resistance of their brains.
It used to be that if a hurricane was threatening to make landfall on American soil, for instance, The Weather Channel would warn people about it in plain language instead of coyly tempting them with antecedent-less pronouns.
Maybe I’m a grumpy old man, futilely reminiscing about some journalistic glory days that never really transpired and are, in any case, never to return. Maybe capitalism has always taken precedence over integrity. Maybe people want stories about abandoned sylvan party buses more than they want up-to-the-minute information about the likelihood of flooding in their area, and maybe they want to guess whether those stories are even about sylvan party buses based on vague rhetoric and associated video stills. Maybe I’m the only lizard-person who needs to constantly supplement the sun’s radiant heat with layers of wool and NASA blankets in order to regulate her body temperature and who has neither the requisite patience nor whimsy to play 20 Questions with a website UX in order to figure out how many NASA blankets she’ll need.
And maybe The Weather Channel employs copy writers who know exactly what a good headline looks like and who choose to write disingenuous clickbait headlines instead because they don’t trust anglophone internet users to be interested in physics.
The video highlighted here (which I watched, both for research and because I ❤ science) was produced by The Weather Channel and features a trick basketball team demonstrating the Magnus Effect by dropping a basketball from a dam multiple times, first with no backspin and then with backspin. They seem to have a pretty clear idea of what will happen to the basketball in each case. It is simple physics; they are adults; they are adults who work with basketballs for a living. If the trick is “unexpected,” it is unexpected for the viewer (although if the viewer watches the video with sound, she will hear from the narrator what is expected to happen before it happens); the language in the clickbait headline, which indicates that the person dropping the basketball didn’t expect the results of this demonstration, is not only untrue, but purposefully misleading.
The idea that news stories are produced for ratings (now “clicks”) and that this is detrimental to journalistic integrity is, of course, not new. Aaron Sorkin had time to write, produce, and make viewers bored with an entire HBO series about it. The market’s inundation with news outlets creates an unending supply of stories for an audience with an allegedly short attention span and a surfeit of options. This, like many aspects of Dothraki mythology, is known; and while the insidious spread of the clickbait headline to even mundane outlets is frustrating in practice, it offers an opportunity to teach student internet users and general consumers of media — both the old and the n00b— how to sift the journalistic wheat from the chaff. When we look at these headlines, instead of falling prey to the psychological need to have our curiosity sated, we should consider whether the curiosity is authentic or reactionary: Are we interested in these stories because they are interesting or because anything will interest us for a moment? Is a story that needs to bait readers likely worth reading? What does the cover of a good book look like?
Clickbait headlines are meant to generate hits, as their name implies. All sensationalist reporting is meant to generate attention, and the more attention is generated around a story, the more attention it pulls, etc; we know how the media circus spins. The larger the media becomes, the more the effect of the circus is compounded, and so what in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a vortex of cable television news channels reporting the same few dozen stories on various channels, 24 hours a day, now is a vortex of dozens more cable television news channels, plus the internet, all reporting the same few hundred stories through various media, 24 hours a day. SEO makes it difficult to quickly find information that isn’t biased or lacking credibility, so that — apart from Google-sponsored results and the few giants of internet wisdom, like imdb and Wikipedia —easy access to reliable research material basically requires a JSTOR account.
The internet should be making information more egalitarian, and in theory, it is. When availability of objective, well-presented information becomes scarce because the market has stopped demanding it, however, the market needs to reevaluate its needs and broadcast them to the suppliers. By becoming more critical and discerning readers, we can engage with information in more thoughtful and productive ways, and we can make choices that favor more responsible reporting and inspire better journalistic practices online and IRL. Clickbait headlines can help us do it.
Part II: He Asked A Question; The Response Will Shock You So Thoroughly That You Will Require Defibrillation
In their 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, authors Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner posit that American schools should do away with many of the traditional trappings of education (e.g. textbooks and exams) in favor of a critical, inquiry-based system that focuses on “why” and “how” a student learns rather than on “what.” Their prescriptions, although presented as school reform, are applicable to learners of all ages and are delivered in chapters with titles like “Pursuing Relevance” and “What’s Worth Knowing?” — goals and questions that each of us should consider every time we encounter new information.
Early in the book, Postman and Weingartner share an anecdote about national treasure and king of my heart, Ernest Hemingway:
In the early 1960s, an interviewer was trying to get Ernest Hemingway to identify the characteristics required for a person to be a “great writer.” As the interviewer offered a list of various possibilities, Hemingway disparaged each in sequence. Finally, frustrated, the interviewer asked, “Isn’t there one essential ingredient that you can identify?” Hemingway replied, “Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”
Hemingway is frank and concise, and what he advocates for great writing — to detect “crap,” and, one assumes, write the truth it seeks to obscure — is what Postman and Weingartner advocate, a few lines below the Hemingway anecdote, for great thinking and great scholarship:
…Our intellectual history is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men who tried to help their contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, and even outright lies. The mileposts along the road of our intellectual development signal those points at which some person developed a new perspective, a new meaning, or a new metaphor. We have in mind a new education that would set out to cultivate just such people — experts at “crap detecting.”
What better example of the kind of “crap” that needs detecting than this current plague of vague, hyperbolic, taunting headlines? We know that we will probably be able to reckon whatever we learn when we click on those links with the extant information in our brains; it’s not as if a video of a tornado or a no-makeup selfie of Beyonce is actually going to dismantle anyone’s worldview. I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D. I’m pretty sure I can look at a really well-crafted novelty cake without losing my grasp on reality.
Yet as ridiculous as these headlines are, their prevalence (especially on sites with aggregate user feeds, like Facebook) speaks to the amount and nature of “crap” that people will tolerate. In the same way that news stations have been employing the “This common kitchen item can kill you — find out what it is tonight at ten” tactic to frighten viewers into choosing between tuning in and accidentally murdering their families by serving dinner, clickbait headlines challenge readers to resist knowing why a man puts colored pencils into a pot of boiling water (hint: the man is using colored pencils as a facsimile for uncooked pasta in a stop-motion video called “Western Spaghetti”) long enough to become engaged by a less provocative but more relevant link.
Unlike Something In Your Kitchen That Might Kill You, “Western Spaghetti” is clever and pleasant; it’s the sort of thing of which anyone (other than stop-motion enthusiasts) who shares it has little more to say than, “This is pretty neat,” making headlines like “He Throws Colored Pencils Into Boiling Water. Why? More Awesome Than You’d Think!” and “I Didn’t Know Why Colored Pencils Were Thrown Into Boiling Water. I Was Amazed When I Found Out Why!” seem not only gratuitous, but as misleading as if the Something In Your Kitchen That Might Kill You turns out to be Your Own Carving Knife, In The Event That It’s Ever Wielded By A Murderer Whose Preferred Execution Method Is Stabbing.
The “Western Spaghetti” example is one of my favorites I’ve encountered via this phenomenon, largely because its headlines perfectly illustrate why the phenomenon is frustrating: the idea of someone putting colored pencils in boiling water is absurd; everyone knows it will make both the pencils and the water unusable. There is no practical reason for boiling colored pencils, so the result must either be an amusing science stunt or an art piece. If the result is an amusing science stunt, I have learned something new about how the world around me works, and I don’t need to be tricked into doing that. If the result is art, I’m viewing someone’s work, and I don’t need to be tricked into doing that, either. I only need to be tricked into watching something stupid. If the link has any value to me, I will click on it freely. If it doesn’t, I’m going to be unhappy that I was tricked into thinking it might.
Logically, this is a no-win situation for me as a viewer and for the website as a resource for information (or even as a resource for amusement); because they do not trust themselves to provide information that I want to read or me to read the information that they provide, they resort to tactics that exacerbate the mistrust between source and audience while, ultimately, linking to the same stories that are circulating the rest of the internet “news” sources on a given day. If a tree falls in the forest and only Kim Kardashian is around to tweet about it, does every aggregation site have to post a screenshot of the tweet?
The colored pencils headlines are nice examples of this phenomenon for a reason beyond their frivolity: they’re not correct. Unlike the basketball headline, they are incorrect without being purposefully misleading (at least regarding the aspect about which they are incorrect), but if you’ve watched the video, you’ve seen that what the artist puts into boiling water is not a handful of colored pencils, but of pick-up sticks. While it’s not material to the viewer that the authors of both headlines (one of whom likely wrote the headline based on the other, without watching the video) misrepresented pick-up sticks as colored pencils, what’s strange is that they chose to write about the colorful-sticks-in-water portion of the video at all —it’s an image that occurs about 40 seconds into a 160-second video, and it’s not any more or less visually delightful than the other images. This is not a video about boiling colorful sticks or even a video about colorful sticks being the artistic representation of something else; it’s a video about many things being the artistic representations of other things, and the sum of those representations is more interesting than the idea of a person boiling sticks, colorful or not. If the clickbait headlines were something like, “He Uses Colorful Sticks As Analogs For Spaghetti, And You’ll Never Guess What He Uses As An Analog For Basil!” the viewer could approach the video prepared for what she’s about to witness, but if the headlines were at least “He Throws Pick-Up Sticks Into Boiling Water!…,” the reader could watch the video while maintaing the belief that the author of the headline had also watched it.
“Why give two shits if a stop-motion video about non-food objects being food was misrepresented in a couple of clickbait headlines?”
…you may be wondering. You may have been wondering this for the past two paragraphs, and it’s a valid question in this scenario because the existence of the stop-motion video has very little real-world impact. Misleading or erroneous journalism about art pieces is less detrimental than misleading or erroneous journalism about, eg, political candidates. And it’s entirely possible that clickbait headlines, because they mean to entice the reader to view the material in question for herself, don’t even have to be accurate. Assuming that everyone clicks through and watches the video clip or reads the open letter or reviews the documents, the headline may as well say, “Here’s a link to a way to pass some time.”
The problem is that most of the aggregation sites subscribe to that motto, even if their actual byline is cleverer or more elegant (StumbleUpon’s “Explore more” is probably the most starry-eyed, while Clickhole’s “Because all content deserves to go viral” is unabashed in both its egalitarianism and its lack of even quality-related discrimination). Ironically, these sites tend to follow the Hemingway (or at least Cracked) headline prescription: “7 Things No One Tells You About Getting A Divorce,” “How Brain Implants (And Other Technology) Could Make The Death Penalty Obsolete,” “Caitlyn Jenner’s New Show Features Her First Meeting With Kanye West” (that last one is an entire sentence!) on their own homepages. Whether each story is relevant to the reader is obvious from its headline; the reader is not seduced into wasting time (while earning the website fractions of pennies) by sifting through vaguely-titled story links, and the data gathered by the site can be more relevantly used to tailor ads and suggestions to the reader’s needs because the reader hasn’t been persuaded to click on a bunch of misleading headlines in whose stories she has no interest.
The persistence of time-wasting as an acceptable goal for sites to have for their readership has inarguably encouraged the proliferation of clickbait headlines. In instances like the “Western Spaghetti” example, the source’s ostensible respect for its readership becomes dubious because the inaccuracy of the headline belies the headline author’s lack of engagement with the very product it is peddling to its readers. It is snake oil sales from a person holding a bottle labeled “Dragon Tears.”
Part III: The Solution Is So Simple, You Will Vomit From Disbelief
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, unless you’re a person who expresses his alcoholism through memes, in which case, cut the lemons into wedges and use them to garnish your vodka on the rocks.
When the internet gives you clickbait headlines, use them to filter out the information outlets that don’t respect your time. As tempting as it might be to find out what “incredible” thing is happening in the next frame after the screenshot, navigate your cursor away from the headline and up to the top of your screen, where you can right-click on the tab to close it.
That’s it.
We stop the madness by voting with our clicks. We exercise our autonomy and choose to give click-quantified preference to headlines that present us with information about which we want to read more. We take power back from the people who structure headlines about natural disasters like the final sentence of a Goosebumps chapter.
As a selective university filters out every application with an SAT score below 2050, let us reject all the headlines that eschew common nouns or threaten to detonate our brains with incredulity. Let us consider whether we actually care about the things we “won’t believe,” and let us spend (and waste) our time on the internet more effectively.
