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Clickbaits: Curious Hypertexts for news narratives in the digital mediumAuthors: lasya.venneti Date: 2017-10-09 Report no: IIIT/TR/2017/82 AbstractNews reporting is increasingly becoming an exercise in attention catching headlines1, and raising expectations which trigger sharing on social media. The proposed paper examines how conventional journalism can stay viable despite the transformations brought by rapidly changing media forms. We examine the role of human curiosity as a major contributing factor in online content navigating mechanisms such as clickbaits, listicles, and sharing behaviour on social media. As news reporting shifts online, the navigation on the internet resembles the exploration of primitive humans beyond their immediate needs. The clickbaity headlines are becoming popular with editors and readers putting pressure on news reports to ’dumbdown’. This paper will explore how evolutionary anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and sociology provide insights into the working of clickbaits: ‘how exactly do they attract viewers and why?’ It is based on a study of news reports in three mainstream Indian newspapers over one year (2014) during which an important general election was held. It studies the headlines that garner attention and analyse their morphology. We hope to use our learnings on clickbaits to see how journalism which stays true to its mandate of informing citizens and providing news can attract views and readership and thus remain viable. Full article: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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