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| Dilbert IS business, basically. Laugh and care about it to advance your career! |
In an era of clickbait nonsense aggregation bullshit, online content in general is in danger of becoming a lobotomized, numbers-driven, shortform mess. When I state with confidence that using the internet can make a person extremely dumb, paranoid, hateful, angry, etc... I am speaking mostly about the content aggregator sites, although mainstream media websites and the 'respected' online only publications are also wracked with issues like poor editorial standards and their habit of mixing serious stories with internet culture fluff. The end result is an uncritical and uninformed mass of people with simplistic world-views and ideas who are around you, and vote and have jobs and discuss whatever malformed ideas they have with like-minded people and shout at those who disagree with them.
I started reading Business Insider earlier this year. I don't know why, I suppose I wanted a wider selection of sites and I'd never really frequented an aggregator before. I figured it would be helpful in determining what wider news trends were... but I was wrong, because Business Insider isn't a news site. It's an aggregator with a 'business' lifestyle slant, which means it will present you with the idols of the cult of success, the accouterments of the cult of success, and Forbes-like fawning and panic about wealth with a subset of stories about actual business some of which may have been bought and paid for by the businesses prominent in that story. Looking at you Shake Shack, Soul Cycle, whatever the newest 'Chipotle-killer' is, etc...
What kept me reading was that I wanted to see how low they'd go. Some of their clickbait articles are so obvious that the site functions as a sort of case study in the decline of news caused by the massive expansion into the void of the internet. The fact that the site was successful enough to be sold for millions (more millions than I'm comfortable with) is a sign that this kind of operation appeals to someone – even if that someone is just advertising and/or PR agencies or some guy with a cargo-cult mentality who thinks reading the imaginatively titled Business Insider will get him a corner office or board seat.
That's the thing, it's not insider information, it's widely available information with a few home-brewed stories... on the one hand they put money in the hands of the people who write useless internet articles, and as much as I do pity them, they are my kind and it's better that there are still jobs where people who write get jobs (even if they go through six or more years of post-secondary education just to write for Buzzfeed or BI). To me, it doesn't matter if that person cannot spell or use words properly,and doesn't know how to use contractions, doesn't have any real passion for language or writing... they could be the biggest, least ink-stained hack of all time but if they're getting six cents a word while a video producer or hype man is out of work, I'm happy. On the other, less expansive hand, they don't produce any 'good' stuff. They provide a service that generally repeats information for a layman crowd. Longform is dead, et cetera...
It's a website that's good at being a brand, and one of those new kinds of brands launched and owned by people slightly more web-savvy than the people who run newspapers, which even as I type it seems crazy, because everyone uses the internet now. The fact remains that traditional media have not adapted super well, I guess, because there are voids where a shrewd person can set up shop and in a few years be valued at millions of dollars.
But what kind of content... that's the important question, right? What's the kind of content they got? Well, it's an eyeful, and I've been filing away some of the more mordant, absurd, and frivolous examples:
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| The headlines are a schizoid mix of important news and 'content', which may affect the minds of long term readers. |
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| Interested in the insider 'hack' about hotels that you probably never knew about? |
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| ["Oh, word?" -Ed.] |
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| Exclusivity is sometimes more important than exclusivity, an important business axiom that beginners don't understand.. |
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| Copy editing is a thing of the past and unnecessary when a large volume of disparate articles need to be produced and posted. |
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| Some of the articles could be parodical, but not even experts can say whether cult of success style writers are self aware enough. |
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| Some articles fall between fluff and re-purposed news, and some are clearly advertisements. |
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| Again: is it a parody? Or is it a plant to make readers think they are sharing a website with the elite? |
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| Lattes, ad-free streaming, and expensive colleges are all important when one is a business person. |
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| Mixing frivolous and possibly serious content is a good way to attract the maximum viewership. |
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| If you thought you could escape prescriptive nonsense stories by switching to 'new media', you were wrong. |
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| ??? |
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| The bizarre headlines contrast in very amusing ways – but sell the idea of a lifestyle that has been proven to be harmful. |
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| The comment section can be quite vociferous and interesting, granting new insights into new media and its discontents. |
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