Nineteenth-Century Clickbait
▻https://daily.jstor.org/nineteenth-century-clickbait
As new technology allows us to feed a steady stream of news into our brains, are we gaining any real knowledge, or just entertaining ourselves with superficial matters?
As Brian Maidment explained in a 2010 paper, that’s the question British elites asked in the early nineteenth century, when cheap magazines created a sudden glut of easily consumed information.
Two aspects of these new magazines’ appeal will sound familiar to anyone who gets their news from a phone today: they used a small format that could fit into a reader’s pocket, and they relied heavily on pictures—in this case, wood engraved images. While cheap “pulp” newspapers weren’t around yet, this way of printing illustrations reduced the cost to bring eye-catching images to a relatively broad audience.