Clickbaits: Curious Hypertexts for news narratives in the digital medium Lasya Venneti Aniket Alam International Institute of Information Technology, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) Hyderabad (IIIT-H) lasya.venneti@research.iiit.ac.in aniket.alam@iiit.ac.in ABSTRACT The Indian print media continues to defy the global trends by News reporting is increasingly becoming an exercise in attention posting robust growth during the last decade, is projected to grow at catching headlines1, and raising expectations which trigger sharing a CAGR of 8% and is forecasted to touch INR 400 billion in 2020[1]. on social media. The proposed paper examines how conventional However newspapers are aggressively pursuing digital space journalism can stay viable despite the transformations brought cautioned by the breath-taking pace of mobile internet growth and by rapidly changing media forms. We examine the role of human penetration, and the demographics of the country. Indian internet curiosity as a major contributing factor in online content navigating users are expected to touch 465 million by June 2017 and the Indian mechanisms such as clickbaits, listicles, and sharing behaviour on mobile usage is estimated to be more than 750 million mobile users social media. by 2018[15].The digital age has dawned on the Indian news report- As news reporting shifts online, the navigation on the internet ing industry. The digital media recognized the need to optimize the resembles the exploration of primitive humans beyond their imme- content to mobile phones and started building in features like alerts, diate needs. The clickbaity headlines are becoming popular with daily updates, breaking news. The legacy print and broadcasting editors and readers putting pressure on news reports to ’dumb- media ’s success in India is determined by distribution, whereas the down’. This paper will explore how evolutionary anthropology, digital news is valued based on reader interest and traffic is the key psychology, neuroscience and sociology provide insights into the litmus test[7]. The digital journalism with its amazing capability to working of clickbaits: ‘how exactly do they attract viewers and aggregate and hyperlink information, multi-modal presentation and why?’ It is based on a study of news reports in three mainstream speed of access and spread will challenge the conventional rules Indian newspapers over one year (2014) during which an important of news reporting business[3, 17]. One of the most well-known general election was held. It studies the headlines that garner atten- methods is the clickbait, it is a global phenomenon, largely used in tion and analyse their morphology. We hope to use our learnings trivia domains like entertainment, fashion, and health and nutrition on clickbaits to see how journalism which stays true to its mandate etc[11, 20]. Now it is also making an entry in serious journalism[21]. of informing citizens and providing news can attract views and Our research focuses on how clickbait is being used and how it can readership and thus remain viable. be used in serious news journalism. Most of the players notably the new digital only platforms recognize that news is unlikely to be Reference format: read on the portal in its layout position and menu, but is likely to Lasya Venneti and Aniket Alam. 2017. Clickbaits: Curious Hypertexts for be read in a context, setting and time driven by the ever evolving news narratives in the digital medium. In Proceedings of Workshop on reader habits of digital navigation[4]. It is in this context we exam- Narrative and Hypertext ’17 (NHT17), Prague, Czech Republic, July 2017, 3 ined the role of human curiosity as a major contributing factor in pages, CEUR-WS.org. online content navigating mechanisms such as clickbaits, listicles, and sharing behavior on social media. 1 INTRODUCTION 2 RELATED WORK With the advent of the news shifting to the internet, electronic tablets and mobile phones started becoming first stop for news, We looked at the existing research available about newspaper read- giving it remarkable immediacy[24]. Legacy media‘s print formats, ing habit[7] and the impact of changing media forms on the style, styles; broadcasting media‘s prime slots started losing relevance structure of the news article[4, 6, 9].There has been extensive study and it is in this context of radically changed media characterized by on detecting clickbaits using linguistic features of text comprising myriad ’information availability and presentation possibilities’, this of a certain types of words decribed as ‘clickbaity ’[5, 10, 11] or paper looks at the viability of the conventional news journalism, non-textual image based cues [6].We have reviewed the theories the reporting style and its morphology. of curiosity from various domains to be able to deduce curiosity models for the news headlines and body narratives. We have taken in theories of curiosity starting from Nature of curiosity [2, 16, 26], modelling of stimuli and collative variables and role of curiosity in social interactions[8].We also looked at the second wave of re- search on curiosity, which combines the instinctual and cognitive aspects of it and hypothesized that this research explains the reader preference for listicles[13, 19]. We also looked at two other as- Copyright held by the author(s). pects of curiosity not often mentioned viz. empathic curiosity in NHT’17, July 2017, Prague, Czech Republic Lasya Venneti and Aniket Alam narratives[14, 18] and tactile curiosity[22] and could posit these mean even if the headline delivers reader expectation 50 % of the theories for clicking and sharing behavior of news narratives on times or to 50 % of the level the reader will keep clicking on the social media. headlines. 3 CURIOSITY MODELS FOR THE HEADLINES 3.3 Information gap and epiphany AND BODY NARRATIVES George Loewenstein‘s information gap theory[19] is the most influ- News gathering and reporting by mankind has its origins in hu- ential one and proposed that information fuels curiosity by creating man craving to share information and our need to do so in an awareness of ignorance. Further he proposed about motivation be- increasingly interdependent society. The underlying role of ‘news hind information seeking in his most recent paper. One of the reporting’, remain unchanged over centuries, is to construct and factors contributing to curiosity is epiphany [13], people are moti- maintain our shared realities. News is a social glue and binds us in vated to acquire information that has the potential to fill multiple to various virtual communities and it helps us shaping our various information gaps at once. These two findings by Loewenstein brings identities[27]. Seeking news and thus acquiring knowledge has us to the design of ‘fact reporting headlines’and the importance of utilitarian, psychological and hedonistic motives to the humans. listicle style news reporting. A well-framed headline with a listicle The study of news seeking behavior of the readers is closely linked instantly brings the reader on to curiosity zone and offers to fill in to curiosity as in humans curiosity is linked to cognition, emotion many gaps through the list. The reader is motivated to click. and behavior. We looked at the scientific literature of the curiosity to understand the reader preferences in selection and sharing of 3.4 Tactile curiosity the news. The following theories are proposed A recent study on motivating people proposed the concept of ‘tactile curiosity’[22] which is based on the view that human cognition is 3.1 Diversive curiosity inherently embodied. The roots of this are in phenomenological tra- Among the psychological models proposed to understand curiosity, dition of philosophy in which objects are described as affordances, earliest and one of the most influential ones is by Daniel Berlyne. most emphatically expressed by Heidegger. We can posit this new He proposed four dimensions of curiosity in his early work charac- concept about determining the reader inclination in selecting the terized by 2 X 2 matrix of epistemic curiosity (desire for information news headline and sharing the article after adding by-lines and and knowledge), perceptual curiosity on one axis (one’s attention their own interpretations. Jacob Bronowski famously said that ‘The to novel objects in their immediate environment) specific curiosity hand is the cutting edge of the mind’. (desire for a particular piece of knowledge), Diversive curiosity[2] (stimulation seeking to escape boredom) on the other. It becomes 3.5 Empathic Curiosity clear from Berlyne’s experiments that navigating on the net is akin A relatively less researched stream is empathic curiosity which is to satisfying diversive curiosity, typically starts with the itch to interest about thoughts and feelings of others (different from gossip explore. The internet surfers seek both new sensations of sights and and prurience). One practices this when one puts oneself in other‘s sounds at the same time long for variety of information. When on shoes (mind). Ian Leslie leading British journalist in his popular the internet, human diversive curiosity is stimulated by the barrage book ‘Curious’[18] categorizes that the major index of empathic of texts, tweets, alerts, breaking news that stimulates hunger for curiosity is literature, drama and poetry. The literary techniques novelty. The headline confirming to satisfying the reader’s rest employed in narratives let the readers experience the feelings of less desire for newness and novelty catches attention. Diversive the character portrayed. This holds great relevance to writing of curiosity is the gateway to further the epistemic interest of the news narratives. The narrative which readers identify themselves reader. with and those with which readers long to fill in the information gap of their friends get shared across the social media. 3.2 Head line as the object of pleasure Humans are said to be hardwired for curiosity, sometimes called 4 METHODOLOGY & DATA SOURCES ’informavores’; it is reasoned that from an evolutionary perspective We have attempted to compute the clickbaity-ness of the head- animals seek out information as it can hold key to the survival line as discussed in the above models by adopting the following and reproduction of the species. They hypothesized that it could methodology. be due to the fact that evolutionary pressures made information • Degree of novelty: A knowledge graph is developed com- intrinsically rewarding and therefore evolution must have built up prising of leading Indian political personalities, states, events, reward system driving the behavior[14]. Research by Neuroscien- ideologies, parties, religions, social formations etc. The di- tists concluded that dopamine neurons responded to information verse curiosity is the degree of novelty of the headline the same way they respond to hunger. The reader of digital news measured by mining path length and depth of entities on is like a traveller on a digital highway, a headline is a ‘curiosity pit the knowledge graph. stop affirming reader bias[25] and providing pleasure of informa- • Anticipation score: We have measured the forward ref- tion’seeking ‘pleasure of information ’. In this situation ’headline’ erencing techniques employed, special characteristics (!,? by itself becomes the object of pleasure. The mere ’raising’ of user etc.), usages in the head lines to establish the anticipation anticipation leads to surge in dopamine levels[12, 23] when the score, a guide was prepared manually with standard Eng- anticipation is 50 % the dopamine levels hit the peak. This would lish usages which served as a reference scale. Clickbaits: Curious Hypertexts for news narratives in the digital medium NHT17, July 2017, Prague, Czech Republic • Epiphany: We attempted to measure this by the length and [19] George Loewenstein. 1994. The Psychology of Curiosity. (1994). structure of the head line and mention of listicle in the [20] Jack Murtha. 2015. What it ‘s like to get paid for clicks. https://www.cjr.org/ analysis/the_mission_sounds_simple_pay.php. headline. [21] Tamara Pearson. 2016. Clickbait v Political Impact: Alternative Journalism as Social Media Becomes the New News Source. counterpunch.org (February 2016). The methodology to compute both tactile and empathic curiosity [22] Jonathan Rowson. 2012. The Power of Curiosity. RSA Social Brain Centre (June is being worked on. 2012). [23] Robert Sapolsky. 2016. Maybe is addictive like nothing else out there. http: //jnack.com/blog/2016/01/06/maybe-is-addictive-like-nothing-else-out-there/. 5 CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION [24] Arjit Sen and Rasmus Nielsen. 2016. Digital Journalism Start-ups in India. Reuters The preliminary analysis shows that high curiosity articles as per Institute for the study of Journalism (May 2016). [25] Jeremy Smith. 2017. The Psychology Triggers Behind Clickbait Titles the score developed indeed agreed with the click through rates & and Why We Click Them. (2017). https://www.jeremysaid.com/blog/ sharing rates obtained from the news site. The study is also bringing psychology-behind-clickbait-titles/. in interesting insights about how the same news is being shared by [26] Tomkins SS. 1962. The positive affects. Springer (1962). [27] Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch. 2009. The Handbook of Journalism the three newspapers on different platforms. Studies. In addition we are looking at headlines, their life on social media involving sharing, responding and liking on two social media plat- forms Twitter & Facebook. We would be looking at comparative trends and also compare it with most read on the newspaper portal. We hope that research will help clarify whether and to what extent clickbait is being used by main stream media in India and give us some initial clues about how effective it is. We hope to Identify some of the broad patterns in which clickbait is used to enhance readership in one small section of India ‘s print media in its digital interface. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work is part of the ongoing MS thesis in Computational Hu- manities under the guidance of Prof. Aniket Alam, formerly Execu- tive Editor of Economic & Political Weekly. REFERENCES [1] 2017. KPMG report on Indian and Media entertainment industry 2017. Federation of Indian chamber of commerce and industry-FICCI (2017). [2] D.E Berlyne. 1960. 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