Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
I thought I had heard a lot of things on the Internet being an IT guy but not until I read an article in the news today where someone mentioned the term, “Click-bait.” I wondered if that were something created to sensationalize the article but I found it defined when doing a search.
Click-bait is content (on the internet), especially a sensational or provocative form, that has a purpose of attracting your attention and to draw you and others toward particularly gifted web pages, i.e., the kind of gifts that keep on taking while you sit there clueless and dumbfounded trying to figure out what you missed and why you are not reaping benefits you may have thought you would get.
I quote, “Clickbait is a pejorative term describing web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. Clickbait headlines typically (eye-catching headlines that include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism) aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make the reader curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.”
When I see or hear of this I think on the old show, “Madmen,” that infers that those who create the hooks tend to make them so enticing and so that they trigger certain parts of our brains that we find it very difficult to see them for what they are and to avoid them.
We have come to instinctively click our mouses when your hindbrain, our monkey/lizard brains, perceive outside our conscious mind something like clickbait we have already clicked the link - toooooo laaaatttteeee!
The only way to combat this type of baiting is to teach ourselves a bit of click-discipline. We must remove our hands from the mouse when we enter a web site, analyze the page and all its content both obvious and hidden in surreptitious links and then decide, like counting to ten before clicking, whether to go somewhere or ignore or leave the site.
Bibliography (Click the link)
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| Don't take the bait!!!! |
