In class today we were looking at the videos on youtube of the singers, and I believe the first one we looked at had around 30 million views! One of the next ones we looked had around 2 million views, but Dr. McGrath pointed out that the video was labeled incorrectly! The title made the person looking at it think that it was a video with the Lord’s Prayer, but if you watch the video it doesn’t have the Lord’s Prayer! But when you actually go to another video that is about the Lord’s Prayer the video has significantly less views.
This connects with a lot of aspects with our lives today! From news articles, TV shows, and youtube videos, there is clickbait everywhere! Content creators are constantly trying to catch peoples attention so that they can get more views, or more clicks. The idea of making things seem more flashy and interesting is like walking a tightrope. You need to make your article or video sound interesting, but not too crazy so people will actually want to read it. The biggest issue I could see are news paper articles. I’m sure you guys have all seen a youtube video or news article with a crazy title, something that seemed so crazy but you just had to click on it to see.
One group that is suffering from clickbait in the media are Islamic people, and anyone or anything from the Middle East. The media will take things out of context to make specific groups of people look or seem worse than they are, which helps them to get more clicks. Rather than embellishing the story to try and gain popularity, the news outlets should focus on just telling the people what they want to hear, the truth.
Great reflection on the broader implications of videos like that – just the point I was hoping the class would take away from it!