Making headlines out of habit
I read this article on Yahoo today, it was one of the headlines / featured stories for the day and it was about a book written about Gandhi with implications that he might be bi-sexual. Oooh – scandalous right? According to the article, the book got good reviews, but some European press went a step further and speculated as to what the author was suggesting.
The marketing thing is that it makes for good headlines and gets attention. And that’s the whole point of launch marketing. I can only imagine how many people will now buy that book because of the hype. And whoever the book’s publisher is or their PR firm, they did their job, if it was planned. And even if it was all an accident (highly doubtful), then as long as the author is sincere, it doesn’t even seem to matter. Of course, the author is saying that’s not even in the book and is moving away from that angle, which only seems to spin off a side story.
That right there is the entire process of press releases and launch marketing in a nutshell. Modeling that process and being able to replicate that process would be worth pondering.
Beyond that however, the amazing thing is the habits and patterns that people fall into for even figuring out what news is. What is your home page set to? What’s the agenda for that company? What news do you follow? What articles do you read? Do you do that daily? Habitually? Why?
Search engines, new sites, news papers, they all have a bias. And their job is to shape and distort things to their liking. They are deliberately showing you what they want to. Either what they think you want to see or what they think will get the most responses / clicks. That’s their job.
I’d imagine our job as a consumer and creator of that information is to be eternally vigilant in terms of your self and perception of the world. In one regard, the Internet has been a wonderful creation. And in yet another regard, it seems to have further fractured people and community away from consensual reality.
As a society in an informational age, we’ve become quite addicted to that information. I refer it to as living in ‘informational trances’. That’s why pattern interrupts are so effective as a headline attention getting mechanism. And it doesn’t even matter if Gandhi preferred men too. Just the mere suggestion is enough to get attention these days.
