Competing for Time

Clickbait is everywhere. Listsicles — the tiny cocaine hits of internet traffic — permeate every site and every topic, from “23 things you’d better know about the fossil fuel investments in your 401(k)” to “15 reasons the Gemini you’re dating is secretly your twin.”

These listsicles aim to distill concepts and data into easily consumable and scannable content. Content that the reader can zip through and understand without much analysis and hard work.

POW! A cleverly placed GIF halfway through the list draws the eyes in. #Relatable. #Givemeabreak. #Thisusedtobecalledapoundsign.

Something, however, is lost in the distillation of an article into list form. By stripping down an article into a skeleton of bullet points and pictures, the article begins to function more as a blueprint to a traditional piece of writing. The main thoughts exist, but the support to them drifts away. It’s reading without all the hard work. Therefore, it is reading without learning or growth.

For a topic such as a 401(k), this condensed formula causes the information that should be conveyed to the reader to enter such a watered down state as to effectively become meaningless. For something as vapid as “gemini dating,” the article doesn’t function to send information from a writer to a reader; instead, it serves solely as distraction. There is nothing important that can be gleaned from such a listsicle; it is entertainment distilled down into its barest parts: flashy photos, buzzwords, hyperbole, and half-baked humor.

It is entertainment deconstructed.

It is painfully addictive.

These listsicles, however, are engineered as such. They aren’t broken in the sense that they are not conveying information. They never were intended to do so. Instead, they were intended to be clicked, to be glossed over, to be shared, to be consumed. They are all vying for two things wrapped together: our attention and time. Online, where everything is skippable, dividable (albums on Spotify, diced into singles that one can speed through), where content can be consumed simultaneously (Netflix on one screen; Buzzfeed on the other), content is in a race to the bottom to secure your attention and time. The flashier, the more bite-size, the speedier the content, the more readily we all slurp it up. To make us click, content is deliberately made pointless by the paring away of actual information and the magnification of nonsense. Simply put, the catchier the article, the more useless it is.

These listsicles function as time sucks. A reader skims it over and gains nothing except for a momentary use of time that could be spent on anything else. Perhaps on a crowded train, or on a slow elevator, reading such a listsicle seems harmless, but the end result is that the only difference between reading a listsicle on a slow elevator and doing nothing at all, is that the fleeting feeling of boredom is erased in the former and present in the latter.

That is all the listsicle does: removes the sense of quotidian boredom which punctuates moments without purpose. It is the internet-content-drug, and it has made content addicts out of millions.

Subconsciously or consciously, the writers of these articles know this. They must know that these articles are useless, and they (the writers) function as enablers, pushers. They peddle their wares of “8 ways Disney princesses were woke and/or basic and/or hipster and/or socialist AF” solely to garner clicks, to feast on the time of their reader in while giving nothing of value in return. They gain viewership, readership, sponsorship while readers gain a momentary respite from focus.

We give them our time, which gives them money. They give us hits of distraction.

We deserve better than that.

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