Bitcoins Can Now Legally Marry
Looking to capitalize on loving Bitcoins searching for a wallet, a new online startup called DogesForBitcoins lobbied Congress to let doges order pizza and pay with Bitcoins, by allowing long lost Bitcoins to come together in a single wallet. So here’s a bunch of Bitcoins celebrating a major civil rights milestone and their freedom to be awesome. It makes me tear up a little. I think it will make you tear up too.
Sorry, but this isn’t the story you think it is. BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Business Insider, Gizmodo, etc. - these are all viral content mills bragging about how they are able to pander so successfully. One of the ways they accomplish this is with sensational titles filled with hyperbole and anecdotes.
These are headlines designed to fuel page-view journalism, something we call clickbait. They want you to click on the link so they can waste more of your time and thus get money from their advertisers and sponsors. They fill your social media feed (if you so choose) with hundreds of lists such as “14 Places You Have To Poop At Before You Die” among others.
I despise this. These articles are the most intellectually vacant content on the Internet.
To start, there is very little actual writing involved in creating these. The vast majority of the time they are re-sharing old content rather than creating something new. Secondly, the content they publish helps to reduce our collective attention spans.
Upworthy beckons us with saccharine thoughts like this:
This kind of content distorts our view of reality. They deliver a view that is “all sweet and no sweat”. For example, Upworthy’s stated mission is to promote “meaningful stories” by using social media to reach as many people as possible. However, Upworthy’s claim that they are curating content that is “meaningful and authentic” obscures the fact that they are skilled at optimizing content that makes people feel good about themselves by sharing it.
These sites exploit our psychology so we don’t feel anything but nicely packaged happiness when exploring their content. And this distracts from the real issues, the real stories that need to be told.
Earlier in the week, a petition titled “Deport Justin Bieber and revoke his green card” crossed the 100,000 signature mark, and it now has over 237K. Meanwhile, a petition to “Make all higher education student loan payments tax deductible” has only 6,000.
One of my friends, Christopher E. Oliver, summed up the problem best in a recent post:
Am I the only one that sees the real issue that more people get upset and start acting on a celebrity than they do about real issues. Let alone the fact that they don’t trust our courts to do what they’re supposed to do. Great, a lot of people don’t like Bieber, but to see a petition go to the White House within the week for them to act on it is surprising. Where have we been the last few years on the real problems?
In our society of clickbait/pageview journalism, we care more about a pop star than our own educational futures. This is a sad state of affairs.
So, the question remains:
How do we fix this?
There are no easy answers to changing the intellectual vacancy of our culture. However, we can start by refusing to patronize the sites mentioned above and stop sharing their content. We can work to develop new business models for online journalism - ones fueled by the quality of a story, not by how many Facebook likes it gets.
Page-view journalism is quickly watering down our news, and distorting our view of the world. Let’s change this.
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Thanks to Christopher Oliver for his comments and On The Media for their story on Upworthy which contributed to this post.