Yesterday one of our customers came to the shop to get something, while she was talking to mom, she was also trying to read something on her phone. Immediately I moved closed to her as a curious cat that I am, she said why is it that most news are all about death and destruction. I then checked the news myself and I read in there that a whole 18 passenger bus had an accident and the whole passengers met their demise instantly.
I’m known to be jovial with most of my moms customers, but every so often I also add in a bit of truth if need be. Furthermore, I wasn’t even going to argue about why there’s so much bad news everywhere. Because apparently, to her, she now has the idea that horror and terror is the most common thing nowadays.
This is undoubtedly how the media and many news outlets out there manipulate and trigger us to click their dopamine fueled content.
In the past, we are known to have town criers who are the ones to pass a message from the king to the people. I don’t know about your culture, but out here that’s the tradition of the olden days.
Back then, news was a message that was usually passed from a king to inform the people about an event or some happenings that were important to the community. Also, there are other form of passing messages across the community in an informal way, which is through gossip. This is the format for making a news widespread.
Back then it used to be about stuffs that really happened and was done physically through the word of mouth. However, ever since we’ve evolved and became civilized we’ve started detaching ourselves to reality and instead are now connected to the internet like it’s the real world that anything we read on there are now considered to be true and real even if we don’t know where or how it happened.
How we went from that to the new era of passing messages across to citizens shows how much we’ve lost as a community and as a nation. I don’t really want to dive much into the news bullish because we all know how it’s programmed.
But then would you click and read good news if that’s what was published by the media?
This was a question I posed to her after she complained about the horrors of what the medias are posting.
You see, we humans are usually drawn towards the negative and the media being a platform that relies on clicks, they need something that would trigger people's emotions so that they would want to read more.
When we see bad news, especially ones that involve death, at first, what many of us think is that we are glad it didn’t happen to us. But when it’s good news, we will be triggered in differently. For instance, if you see a man on the screen about how he bought 100 cars in a day when we ourselves don’t yet own one. The emotion attached to this is quite different from the bad ones because in these scenarios we feel incomplete and, to some extent, pressured and also stressed because we would want to compare ourselves to that person and knowing that we might never meet up is something that later makes us feel bad about ourselves.
But for bad news, you feel good because you’re still living and breathing. Even if you do feel empathetic and sad about the incident, there’s still a part of us that’s grateful it didn’t happen to us.
The customer reply was that she would definitely not click if it’s good news because there’s really nothing to read about buying cars or building houses.
This is the truth — Bad shit sells like shit
What do you think about how the media are trying to clickbait everyone with bad news? Do you think it’s a good idea or a bad one? Do you even read the news, tell us why you do and also why you don’t in the comment section below.
