Just spent 45 minutes that Ill never get back picking this bit of meta-clickbait apart ... Headline: Promises something not delivered (the “why” part, unless you count “because FLUENCY!”). Graf 4: Confutes what we’re interested in with what we feel is important to us, then assumes time spent consuming content is analogous to the importance of that content in our lives. This is like observing that your dad spends 2 hours a day eating and 4 hours a day watching football on TV, and therefore TV is twice as important to him as eating. Graf 7 assumes that the more “important” a story is overall, the more it’s read and shared. The examples given are revealing here. Who’s to say sharers are not assuming their friends can find Iraq news on their own, but would benefit from some timely info about gluten or postpartum depression? Also, the implication that those stories are unimportant is not justified. Graf 9 cites a list of 20 viral stories, observes that none of them are about important news, and concludes that clickbait is the most important form of news for most people. Other possible conclusions, such as readers substituting social-media interactions for zoning out on the couch re-watching Sleepless In Seattle, are ignored. In other words, it assumes the clickbait’s virality comes at the expense of important news content, when it may in fact come at the expense of other forms of leisure activity. Graf 10 is a pretty tortured metaphor, although it illustrates the flawed case the author is making pretty well. Graf 11 is name-calling. It also ignores several major extenuating circumstances that render the example meaningless, including the disputes between U.S. cable providers and Al Jazeera America over carriage (currently 55 million subscribers have Al-Jazeera available to them, often via inconvenient and hard-to-find channel numbers, vs. about 175 million who get FOX and CNN, both in handy mainstream places on the dial) and the fact that many Americans distrust Al Jazeera due to its connection to the Qatari government. And if youll forgive me for indulging in a little snide comment here, I would think the author would know about the CATV carriage troubles of Al Jazeera America if hard news was as important to him as he implies. Graf 12 includes several dubious and unattributed assertions relating to human psychology that, at first glance, ring with the synthetic truthiness of conventional wisdom. The first is that attention-starved people prefer familiar stimuli. This may be true, and probably is (it’s unattributed, so who knows?), but the assertion implied by using it here is that we as a society are too “attention-starved” to shoulder the burdens of hard-news consumption. If thats the intended conclusion, the author should unpack and stand behind it, rather than leaving it on the doorstep like a burning bag of sheep shit. Graf 13 includes a blatant unattributed assertion bolstered with an appeal to popularity (“It’s a not-even-industry secret that ...”) Also, “Grappling with new information is exhausting” is a dubious assertion in the context of news consumption, and comes off as insultingly condescending in a “don’t worry your pretty little head” kind of way. And Graf 15 asserts that the highest purpose of journalism is “learning the ugly truth.” Why not “learning the shocking truth” or “learning the secret truth” or “learning the truth that THEY don’t want you to know”? When you qualify truth like that, at some point it stops being truth and starts being a quest for worldview ratification ... ... rather like this article. theatlantic/business/archive/2014/06/news-kim-kardashian-kanye-west-benghazi/372906/#disqus_thread
Posted on: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 16:43:00 +0000
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