Clickbait: 12 Things to Know

1. 1. There is a fight going on for your attention. It isn’t new. Through history, communicators have always fought to capture and hold the attention of others, to entertain, inform, and persuade.
      
      
   2. The fight has changed. As technology advanced in the 20th and 21st centuries, the number of ways to reach potential consumers grew. Content became cheaper to produce and easier to access. Each new advance in content availability brought with it advances in how products could be marketed.
      
      
   3. For a time, the fight was against open space: creators and advertisers worked on putting media and advertisements in all the places in our lives where they weren’t already, with innovations like jersey sponsors, streaming services, and mobile gaming.
      
      
   4. The fight has changed again: In the last five years, some media researchers have suggested that there are no holes in our day left to fill. Not only that, but as our waking hours have filled with media, we’ve become easier to bore and harder to convince.
      
      
   5. To compete with each other, content creators and advertisers have adopted increasingly sophisticated strategies for catching and holding our attention.
      
      
   6. The most effective strategies rely on collecting and interpreting information:  information from neuroscience and the social sciences about how we think; what colors, animations, words and emotions light up our brains; information from social media, online ads, free platforms, apps, and streaming services about how we behave online.
      
      
   7. The science of what our brains like and the science of how we behave online are both partially the study of a chemical in our brains called dopamine. Among other purposes, dopamine controls our sensations of desire and satisfaction. The more dopamine an experience releases in our brains, the more our brains want to repeat the experience. Dopamine operates on an instinctive, unconscious level, and is habit-forming.
      
      
   8. This means that many elements of web design and content creation are designed to influence us in unconscious, instinctive, habit-forming ways.
      
      
   9. Here are some dopamine triggers: refreshing a newsfeed, emotionally-charged headlines (positive or negative), lists, little red notifications, articles that promise to reveal secrets and shortcuts, content that affirms our attitudes and ideas, and counters that tabulate likes and views on our posts.
      
      
   10. This system is not all bad; it gives us free tools and platforms. It gives us content that matches our individual tastes. It means commercials are more fun and less annoying.
       
       
   11. But there are downsides.

       Dopamine release triggered by emotionally-charged headlines, oversimplification of complex issues, and content that reinforces group identity can feed bias and polarization. That’s a problem worthy of our attention.
       
       More subtly, dopamine-based design and content can also consume our lives and fragment our concentration. Our attention spans get shorter and our need for immediate rewards increases. Finding or posting content that is “true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy” becomes a secondary concern after consuming or creating content that satisfies our brain’s craving for dopamine.

   12. Throwing away our electronics, unsubscribing, and trying to escape completely from the dopamine-trigger world of media saturation is not the solution. It’s the shape of our world; the world we’re called to live and minister in.
       
       

Instead, consider setting boundaries for media consumption, limiting how much time, or at what times of day you will be active online. Even a small measure of discipline helps us practice discipline against the impulses of our dopamine, and remember the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things are permitted for me, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted for me, but I will not be mastered by anything” (NASB).