CUTE BUT EVIL
YOU SIT DOWN TO YOUR COMPUTER TO WORK. FIVE minutes later you’re on your fifth YouTube video of talking babies. What happened? Do you just not have any self-control? Sorry, but self-control has got nothing to do with it. Not when the clip was deliberately made more attractive by subliminally embedded images guaranteed to catch your attention. Not when the length of the video was calibrated to be precisely as long as average viewers are statistically most likely to watch.
Would you also be surprised to hear that the content of the video was designed around popular search terms? And that the title went through multiple iterations to see which got the most clicks? And what if the video you watch after this one (and the one after that and after that) had been recommended and optimized by YouTube with the deliberate intention of making online video take up as much time in your life as television does?1
No wonder you can’t get any work done. They won’t let you.
The key, as megawatt liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advised when interviewed for the book Making It in the Political Blogosphere, is to keep readers addicted: “The idea is to discourage people from drifting away. If you give them a break, they might find that there’s something else that’s just as good, and they might go away.”
We once naively believed that blogs would be a boon to democracy. Unlike TV, the web wasn’t about passive consumption. Blogs were about engagement and citizen activism. Blogs looked like they would free us from a crummy media world of bias, conflict, manipulation, and sensationalism. But as James Fennimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”
Tyranny is an understatement for the media today. Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television. America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Facebook, and nearly a quarter of all Internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs. In a given month, blogs stream something like 150 million video streams to their users. So of course there is mass submission and apathy—everyone is distracted, deliberately so.2
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
THE ART OF THUMBNAIL CHEATING
You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she’s nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of “thumbnail cheating.” It’s a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.
The most common play is to use a girl, preferably one who looks like she might get naked, but it can be anything from a kitten to a photo of someone famous. Anything to give the clip an edge. Some of the biggest accounts on YouTube were built this way. The technique can drive thousands or even tens of thousands of views to a video, helping it chart on most viewed lists and allowing it to spread and be recommended.
Online video publishers do this with YouTube’s consent. Originally, YouTube chose a video thumbnail from the ½, ¼, or ¾ points of the video. So smart manipulators simply inserted a single frame of a sexy image at exactly one of those points in order to draw clicks. Members of the YouTube Partner Program—the people who get paid for their contributions to YouTube through ad revenue and make millions for the company—are allowed to use any image they choose as their thumbnail, even images that don’t ever appear in the video. Sure, YouTube asks that the image be “representative” but if they were actually serious about quashing profitable trickery, why allow the practice at all?
GENETICALLY MODIFIED ENTERTAINMENT
LOLcats, the cute captioned kitty photos, are a viral mainstay that started as good-time fun but are much more than that now. It’s not enough that some may make you chuckle while others may not. A hit or a miss is a risk that must be avoided.
In May 2011, the Cheezburger Network—now also the powerhouse purveyor of fail photos, funny infographics, and daily links, with nearly a half-billion pageviews a month—hired a prominent data scientist. His job: to build a team to monitor every pageview and metric the sites get in order to shape the content around that information. That is, in his words, to engineer “more smiles for people per day.” A media empire paid by the smile can’t afford anything less.
I mean no disrespect. After all, I sold an Internet meme site I owned called FailDogs.com to the Cheezburger network. I knew I was never going to be as good as they were. I was just one person, and I couldn’t turn the fifteen minutes of fame from the site into a business. But Cheezburger could, by rendering users powerless to resist the urge to click. And they could do it with an irresistible veneer of cuteness masking their tactics.
Entire companies are now built on this model, exploiting the intersection between entertainment, impulse, and the profit margins of low-quality content. What they produce is not so much information but genetically modified information—pumped with steroids and hormones.
Demand Media, owner of eHow, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong.com, Cracked.com, Answerbag.com, and others, specializes in this type of algorithmically created media. Relying heavily on computer algorithms and massive data dumps, they craft online perfection in the form of low-cost, click-heavy content that advertisers love. Like successive sieves, each refines the contents of the one that came before it; Demand’s automated editing systems pump out up to thirty thousand video clips and articles about trivial topics like baking cookies or “best of” lists. It generates millions of pageviews a day, and all of it sucks.
Their process is simple. First, Demand’s algorithm trolls the web for lucrative search terms. It dreams up a piece of media, such as a video tutorial or a brief article, that combines as many popular terms as possible and estimates a lifetime value (LTV) of its financial worth. A second algorithm examines this concept again, creating options for the most search-friendly and provocative title. These options are fed to a human editor trained in the same art, who selects the best one. Then another editor reviews the previous editor’s choice and optimizes it further, before settling on the final pitch for what should be created.
It is here, after being processed through secret computer algorithms and surgically modified by data analysts instead of editors, that the product is finally ready for writers. These writers are paid to follow the exacting prescriptions of more data-driven instructions. By the time the content is ready to be published, advertisements will have already been sold against it. These advertisers are Demand’s real audience.3
When these content rules are not explicitly mandated by data specialists and analysts, they are implicit; bloggers know to default to what will spread and please the advertisers. People taught the logic of machines are Demand’s final sieve. As one Demand Media editor e-mailed to a new contributor whose first article was rejected for not following their surefire format for going viral: “The mistakes you’ve made indicate you’re new to Demand. This will become second nature as you learn the formats and the site requirements.”4 It’s a second nature known well by YouTubers, LOL makers, podcasters, bloggers, and tweeters.
DRUGGED AND DELUSIONAL: THE RESULT
I remember seeing Jeff Jarvis, the blogger best known for his condescending (and unsolicited) advice to the newspaper industry, at a tech conference once. He sat down next to me, ostensibly to watch and listen to the talk. Not once did he look up from his laptop. He tapped away the entire time, first on Twitter, then on Facebook, then moderating comments on his blog, and on and on, completely oblivious to the world. It struck me then that whatever I decided to do with the rest of my life, I did not want to end up like him. Because at the end of the talk, Jarvis got up and spoke during the panel’s Q&A, addressing the speakers as well as the audience. In the world of the web, why should not paying attention preclude you from getting your say?
That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote:
The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance…. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.5
This is the exact reaction that web content is designed to produce. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one. The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to Nielson, active social networkers are 26 percent more likely to give their opinion on politics and current events off-line, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites. They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your mobile phone and include you on e-mail alerts. If the users stops for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.