Aram Zucker-Scharff

Naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence: to click or not to click?:

From private photos to violent videos, the internet is full of degrading material intended to tempt viewers. Can we learn not to gawp, asks Stuart Jeffries

Putting on my internet studies hat, I’m finding the conversations that have been popping up around this fascinating. This is another sort of specific-to-general piece that takes a look at what our clicks mean, and don’t. 

“while we write objecting to the violation of Hollywood stars’ image rights and the abuse of their privacy, the internet carries on regardless making life more miserable for women and more degrading for men.

There’s something Canutish about Badham’s injunction not to click. It does little to address the herd of elephants in the room – the objectification of women’s bodies, the spread of misogyny that the internet has facilitated, the poison of online porn beyond Hugh Hefner’s wettest dreams, the real-world consequences for human relationships of the endless parade of naked bodies beyond Roger Ebert’s anti-puritanical hopes across computer screens.”

““Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. That’s how the media works now. There’s all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture.””

– “Don’t like clickbait? Don’t click”, Sally Kohn (2014)

“

There is not one but several “cultures of the click.”

Take the example of the gap between what journalists say about web metrics and what they do when they check their own traffic numbers. I find that journalists are particularly likely to have conflicted reactions to metrics when working for publications with high editorial ambitions facing financial instability. In this case, writers criticize the chase for clicks, but also understand online success as a signal of professional value.

”

– When it comes to chasing clicks, journalists say one thing but feel pressure to do another.