Megan West(erby)

On eyes, jumps, and split decisions.

maura:

This week made me have lots of Feelings about the way that my different selves — my professional self, my corporeal self, my emotional self, etc etc — rub up against one another. A few were not so bad! But a lot of them made me want to jump out a window, although I live on the second floor so if I’d acted on that particular impulse when I felt it most strongly I probably would have just walked away with a couple of bruises and an even more pronounced feeling of irritation.

So I just would like to reiterate that the Brave New World Of The Internet In Which Serendipity Makes Us All Better People is pretty much a fallacy (sorry Derek). It’s possible in a pie-in-the-sky way, but the crucial difference here is one of (very subtle!) action. While reading, say, a newspaper, a person’s eye can fall on something and just land there; there’s no discrete action required in order for said person to, say, read a story or look at a picture that’s on the same page as what is currently being read. However, when said person is looking at a Web site and presented with a sidebar of related links, actually reading the content at said link requires a much more thorough decision-making process. It’s a quick one, to be sure! But it’s very powerful and it involves multiple choices being made (‘what is this,’ ‘am I interested in this,’ ‘should I click on this’ — obviously that process goes even deeper if the content in question is paginated). And it actually has a print analogue — does no one remember when the Chicago Tribune decided to jump all its front-page stories to the back page of the A section in order to ease its readers’ decisions to stick with longer high-profile pieces?

So stories still have to appeal to the “Megan Fox in panties with her arms over her head” lizard brain in order to breach that gap. And this gets tiring! But websites that want to make money (or just elevate the profiles of their writers) need to appeal to that part of the mind as well, which eventually results in us getting our Internet clogged up with endless variations on the “The Contrarian Take On This Piece That You Shouldn’t Deign To Read Because You’ll Only Give The Bad People More Pageviews.” It happened with Marie Claire; it happened with Gawker; it’s going to probably happen at least two more times between now and Election Day, since the spectre of that day seems to be making everyone extra batshit. And you know what it really does? It makes the “Bad People” get more pageviews, of course. And those inflated hit counts (don’t even get me started on the comments!) send a message about exactly what sort of content should be put out there, because even if it’s somehow both soul-deadening and infuriating it also brings home that CPM bacon. 

Maura’s meta is particularly pointed and brilliant today. That damn CPM bacon tastes faker than vegan bacon.

29 October 2010 ·