BREAKING NEWS: [Insert popular character] did [something horrible]
Clickbait in a nutshell
You see, clickbaiting has been part of humanity for a long time. It wasn't called clickbaiting of course but fraud. Fishy doctors selling their snake oil, apparently curing every disease there is.
Nowadays everyone is doing it, even the news network. Writing every stupid thing to attract the attention of their prey.
"BREAKING NEWS: JUSTING BIEBER GOT SHOT" (and in reality someone threw an egg at him or whatever) This was just an example.
There is no truth anymore, the media was supposed to be for sharing information with the world. But today, we are drowning in overstimulating cartoons or fake news. We are becoming dependant of those things and we are too lazy to change anything. Why? Because it is entertaining.
We need drama, it is a change for our boring and repetetive lives. Another example would be a car accident. Everyone has too see it, driving past the crashed car to shoot some photos or record it.
Humanity is evolving back into its former state
A mindless animal.
Surfing through the net, clicking on every interesting topic, reading through so much intelligence decreasing content, for the sake of entertainment.
Almost no one can resist clickbaits, even the most resistant are having trouble to avoid it. We need to fulfill our curiousity in order to move on. And this is the true strength of these so called clickbaits. They tickle our interest, convince us to just take a little look.
A big mountain of nonsense
The media has devolved into a mass of bullshitting. The truth is disturbed to such a degree that it sole purpose is to gain money from unexpecting victims and the worst about all of this is, we do nothing about it. We are continuously lured into made up stories.
We are just consumers
One big problem is that the media does not take us for intellectual individuals. They have no respect for us, those people take us for fools, thinking we are mindless zombies absorbing every crap they are ejecting.
It is just sad to see that they have no respect for us. We are the ones providing them money by wasting our time consuming their nonsense.
Will there be change?
Sadly no. It was always like this, the press forming the truth in order to create drama, which in turn increases their profit.
Blogs talking about diets, workouts or other topics about health. Taking advantage of the people who are in dire need for actual help.
Certainly there will always be those who take advantage of others ignorance... but if you look at the efficacy of an Edward Bernays type approach to marketing its been superseded by yet more effective means of mass manipulation. The days of mass media dominance are numbered imho, soon someone else will inherit the role of praying on the weak and ignorant for personal gain. Good on you bringing up a relevant issue.
It is in the nature of humans, called greed. Most commercials have subliminal messages, a picture of a burger, that you see for one second while driving a car will have its impact. It triggers responses in your brain. The more you are hungry, the more it will affect you. Big enterprises like facebook for example, sell our personal information to advertisement companies. That is why we see exactly what we want and need. This is one of their methods to suck every possible profit out of us. And what is that information worth? About $10. We are not really consumers, for them we are just their product.