In the push for traffic, viral content and revenue, has our online experience been so manipulated the Internet losing its appeal?
For many of us, and if we are prepared to admit it, we are becoming fatigued by the Internet. While this by no way means that we are cutting it out of our lives for good, to varying degrees, we might be suffering from overload, especially on our social networks. So much information is vying for our attention – video clips, chain posts, advertisements, to name a few – and in what limited time we have, we have to be ruthless about what we read and focus on.
Consequently, one of the filters many of us apply to identify what content we should access, is authenticity: whether a content creator is sharing personal or first hand experiences, or material that genuinely enriches our lives. However, with all of the data and analytics available on online user behaviour, are we truly getting authentic content, or that which has been manufactured to appeal to our tastes and biases?
Over the past month, that question reared its head in the United States, quite compellingly, in the case of Rachel Brewson. In summary, and in December 2015, Rachel Brewson authored two posts, which were first published on the website, ReviewWeekly.com, in which she shared the experience of falling in love with a man who supports the Republican party, whilst she is a Liberal Democrat. By the second article, which was published in March 2016, Rachel and her boyfriend had broken up, but her two posts had garnered thousands of comments, and were republished on other websites, and ultimately took on a life of its own – until it all came crashing down. Rachel Brewson does not exist.
… “Rachel Brewson” was fake, the product of an unusually involved internet marketing scheme that managed to strew blog posts, personal essays, and social media profiles across fairly well-trafficked sections of the Internet.
Brewson wasn’t a publicity stunt, but an attempt to make money. The character was created by an (all-male) team of internet marketers interested in pushing traffic back to Review Weekly, a site that relied on various internet monetization schemes to try to generate a profit. In the process, they created a bunch of flimsy fake characters to write posts, and an unusually detailed one: Rachel. “She” got published on a few big sites—xoJane, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily—appeared on TV (where the company hired amateur actors to play her and Todd), and left a trail of profiles that remain on the internet to this day.
(Source: Jezebel)
Whilst the above experience might seem a bit extreme, increasingly, online content creators are being driven by the opportunity to make money. There is considerable impetus to create viral, or otherwise newsworthy, content, to increase traffic to the content, and perhaps, more importantly, capitalise on revenue generation options. As a result, much of the content we are seeing online, especially in our social media feeds, seems to be getting very monotonous and formulaic, as individuals seek to manipulate search engine and social network algorithms, to increase their visibility on those platforms.
Having said this, individuals (or companies) trying to game a system to maximise the benefits to themselves is nothing new. It happens in almost every medium, where for example, one person’s innovation yields considerable dividends, but soon thereafter that approach is copied (more or frequently less successfully) by a whole host of others to try to realise similar gains. It may therefore mean that we are finally reaching the stage where the excitement associated with the Internet, and social media in particular, is beginning to die down, and hopefully, we are finally getting to a point where we can put the changing role of those mediums into perspective.
Image credit: photostock (FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
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