“Reading this article will change the way you understand journalism.” Or, "A young activist opens a site and rewrites the fate of information." If we were on Upworthy, these could be two titles suitable for the present reading, in which we try to reconstruct a model as successful as it has been criticized, such as that of the content aggregation site founded by Eli Pariser.
Criticisms and successes that tell a lot about the quality of today's journalism and the finding of real news. Because if once the problem was how to access information or how to obtain impartial and objective information, today the real dilemma is how to combine information and virality. In fact, since social networks were introduced, the best way to pass a message or news is entirely enclosed in buttons such as share, like or retweet. This new model of sharing and questioning content has had various consequences, not the least of which are an anxiety to be first ("Share this content first" is the invitation most often addressed by programs) and a tendency to post only articles, photos and videos that attract a high number of thumbs up.
Faced with this state of affairs, where it is clear that interest in pure information succumbs to interest in attractive, cute and engaging content, one can react in two ways. You can choose to combine both types, hoping that the ephemeral content will create access to valuable content, as most newspapers and widely distributed aggregators do (among which the best known is certainly Buzzfeed).
Or you can disguise your quality content with a catchy and enticing headline. This second method is the one chosen by Upworthy's editorial staff. It's called Curiosity Gap and it's a much discussed method of titling pieces, which tends to open a "gap of curiosity" in the reader such as to make it impossible to suppress the desire to click and read the story to the end.
Eli Pariser and the “Filter Bubble”
Young activist of the internet age, left-wing militant since his university years (when, in the aftermath of 11/XNUMX, he launched a petition against Bush's interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq which reached more than half a million subscriptions), Pariser made his name among the revolutionary young minds of the XNUMXst century as director of MoveOn.org (the largest fundraising site for progressive and liberal campaigns in the United States) and as co-founder of the online petition site Avaaz.org .
In addition to this, in 2011 he gained further fame as a critical voice thanks to the pamphlet against the era of personalizing algorithms: The Filter Bubble. In that essay, Pariser lashed out against the most famous online companies such as Google and Facebook, guilty of leveling dissent through a "filtering bubble" that leads each user to bask only in the type of content they like best, without being interested of alternative voices or spheres to those of one's prearranged interests. The essay had a great success (it was also translated into Italian with the title The filter) and some illustrious criticism (such as that of Evgeny Morozov on the NYTimes).
But above all it has the merit of having given rise to a broad debate around this side effect of making us defenseless consumers by algorithms, which, writes Pariser in his book, create a sort of "invisible self-propaganda", fueling only interests and wishes we already have. A year later, he moved from word to action by co-founding Upworthy with a former editor of satirical online newspaper The Onion, Peter Koechley. Upworthy is a content aggregator that exploits the determining factors for algorithms such as Facebook in order to potentially make quality content viral.
Upworthy's entrance
In the message accompanying Upworthy's entrance, Koechley wrote: “We believe that the things that matter in the world don't have to be boring and guilt-inducing. And that the addictive things we love don't have to be completely insubstantial." In the latest post of his Filter Bubble Blog, Pariser extended the concept, arguing that “in the Darwinian environment of hyper-relevant news feeds, content on issues like homelessness or climate change is no match for clunky viral videos , gossip and kittens. The public sphere goes beyond the horizon. And that matters, because if we can lose sight of common problems, they never lose sight of us."
With this aim, Upworthy, which was created to propagate on social media, uses strong visual components with a crafty but serious care to be able to find the right meeting point between contents that are as spectacular as they are significant. But it's not just the eye that plays its part. Indeed, what mainly caused discussion, between harsh criticism and hilarious parodies, is not so much the visual and aesthetic component of the content, but the titles with a curiosity gap effect. To be as viral as possible, Upworthy openly exploits marketing tools, in particular by using A/B testing among various sample users to find those titles that stimulate more clicks and shares.
However, unlike most online marketing campaigns, Upworthy hides nothing of its process, so much so that it has published a long power point presentation on SlideShare in which its strategies are explored with the same half-joking spirit that distinguishes the entire aggregator site.
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