I’m sure everyone knows that much of what we are taught to desire in advertising is far from the truth of what we are given— the favourite is those photos of juicy, delicious hamburgers that make our mouths water, which are actually plastic painted and dressed with oil.
In today’s day and age of mass consumption, there is potentially no worse offender for feeding our non-selective appetites than the internet. The internet presents to us information in an all-you-can-eat buffet style, compared to the meagre, impoverished days of our parents and ancestors. Information used to be a rare, cherished commodity. Books were only for the rich, which could in turn only be read by people with enough education to understand them. The introduction of libraries — public libraries — was incredible in just how common people could begin to learn and understand the world in the same way that the wealthy could.
The internet presents a curious conundrum here. While it offers the same allure of knowledge that the traditional library did during its heyday, if not in an even more accessible medium, it does not come with the same securities that we once enjoyed with the old $0.10-per-late-day paperbacks. Of course, I’m certain many of you will understand where I am going with this— as the internet is free for all people to access, it is similarly free for all people to contribute to. And, alas, some of these contributions are less helpful than others.
The internet has grown beyond a mere platter of knowledge for the browser to enjoy— it has become an overwhelming sea of information, whose scope reaches beyond what any of us can even imagine. And, as cruel as it may sound to say— the majority of that sea is absolute garbage. The voices of experts in a field can be accessed just as easily as those who know nothing of what they are talking about, and it is not always easy to tell who falls into which category. Completely incorrect information can be presented as if it were gospel, and the truth can be presented in an uncertain matter, causing people to doubt it.
Unlike the library, the internet also operates on fundamentally different principles. Instead of being primarily a place of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, it has become place of information for business’ sake, where extending profit margins is favoured above all else, often at the cost of the quality of content produced.
It can be a sad life for those who truly wish to contribute to the internet in a meaningful and altruistic way. Success online is not measured in impact, but in outreach. Only the numbers designating more viewers, readers, visitors, and supporters for your content count if you ever hope to be significant. By allowing all users to create content, there becomes an insurmountable signal-to-noise ratio for content that consumers may wish to peruse, often deterring them from searching beyond the surface of what they are presented. Ask yourself— when was the last time you went to page 2 after a Google search?
It becomes the job of search algorithms to present what they determine to be the ‘best’ content. What do they designate as ‘best’? Well, relevancy of course comes into play. Most search engines use keywords as criteria, but after that point it’s really all up to the algorithm itself in order to sort through the thousands upon thousands of potentially relevant pieces of media.
What other factors are used to filter down the content? Recency is a big one. Media that is ‘fresh off the press’ is favoured over old news— so that means that if you want your content to remain relevant, you gotta keep producing that content, or else it will be lost to the ages.
Afterwards, content by ‘significant’ forces on the internet are going to be favoured over the content of nobodies. So if you don’t already have an established audience consuming your content, don’t expect anybody new to just happen upon it by accident.
So, what do these two factors together mean for content producers? Well, it creates a certain ‘recipe’ for success. Financial success. You must establish an audience for yourself, and produce content that they enjoy consuming— and content that they will continue to consume, as you cannot loose said audience if you wish to continue to remain relevant. The easiest way to maintain this is by producing nearly formulaic content, so that your audience is not deterred from the bread-and-butter content that they have come to enjoy, and the content creator themselves can pump out content more regularly due to not having to take the time to create something original. Use the same mould, slightly twisted to a new flavour or subject, and you just earned yourself another month on the internet’s big-wig list.
But what does this also encourage? It should be obvious— it encourages the creation of oversimplified, easy-to-digest content. It’s the reason why bullet-list, Buzzfeed-style articles are shared time and time again, over lengthy paragraphs of text that explore multiple sides of an argument in detail, and aim to deliberate rather than tell you what to think (or, more simply, the articles that aim to “show” rather than “tell”). It’s the reason why a two-minute Youtube video telling you why [insert controversial topic] is bad will be watched and shared more readily than a twenty-minute video explaining why that same topic is complex and not black-and-white.
This also encourages the creation of bland, nearly content-less content. Whenever an online series is aimed to be maintained past their planned lifetime, they become so formulaic that they can be completed in a Mad-Libs style.
So, what is our responsibility, as consumers of said media? Well, not an easy one. It’s not something that will be fixed by one person deciding that they won’t be another consumer of easy-bake content. It will require a shift in the entire media consumption habits of the internet— which, we have likely all come to know, is no small task. Until then, it simply becomes something to be mindful of when searching the internet in any matter. Practice safe consumption, and remember— you are what you eat.
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