Am I the only one getting tired of headlines that tease but never deliver? Click on Shark Attack Video, and it becomes video of a local news team describing a shark approaching a swimmer. Cast Member of Popular TV Show Dies becomes death of a bit player you didnt know on a show you didnt watch. Below, Hawkings warning of some galactic collapse is, we click through, no warning at all - of an event that is not possible. You see these sort of teaser headlines all the time and when I get to be king they will stop. More than just nuisances, they are also callous come ons, in the case of a death used but for the purpose of a page view. But also, they are lies. Get that CNN, Yahoo, everyone? There have been scores of email over the years that have the patina of truth but turn out to be fabrications. Remember the one describing members of Congress as inept or criminal?(snopes/politics/crime/congress.asp) It was made up. Plausible enough to win our attention, but just not true. I never understood the reasoning behind these older false posts, but in more recent instances, I do. The stories are invariably true, right? A shark scared a swimmer, the TV performer died, Hawking joked about the God Particle. The competition for our attention is so fierce, however, that none of those stories compel you to read or watch. So a headline - which seems to come from a completely different discipline - becomes a bait and switch. The result is that the web gets filled with more pollution, sites like Yahoo et al become less reliable, and you start to realize, slowly but surely, how little regard these sites and posts have for you. Its not just the waste of time - you should think of it as a kind of theft when people rob you of that finite commodity - but the missed opportunity that bothers me. The shark attack, a tragic death and cosmic collapse were all things you may have been interested in. Too bad the stories didnt match. Yeah, I didnt think the world was going to end. But if I had the same people write the headline to this FB post that were writing the one about Hawking, you would be reading, Williams: You WILL get robbed today!
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 05:31:56 +0000
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