Memes, in general, live off their participatory possibilities of remix and alteration, and their appeal is centrally dependent on their ability to amuse. In addition to the community standards policing appropriate content, this is equally a question of humor and the lack thereof. Pornographic imagery has, despite its broad volume and perennial popularity, fairly seldom grown viral. In its combination of the artsy, the subcultural, the bizarre, the vintage, and the cultish, and by flirting with the boundaries of the risqué, Dangerous Minds contributes to and occupies a specific ecological pocket in social media’s attention economy that comprises its natural habitat.ĭespite the various titillations offered by the quintessentially NSFW genre of pornography, its visuals do not dominate most social media platforms precisely for the reason that #NSFW is also a technique of content filtering. Like numerous other sites, Dangerous Minds trades in spreadable media, yet, unlike the more high-profile clickbaits such as BuzzFeed and Bored Panda, it regularly publishes content marked as “NSFW,” “slightly NSFW,” or “NSFW-ish” that leads to articles on vintage pin-ups, cross-dressers, and pulp fiction films, paintings, and sculptures dwelling on the fleshly details of human bodies and introductions to “the erotic art of the enema.” The content spread in social media has grown increasingly and characteristically SFW. Operating a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, as well as a Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google+ presence, Dangerous Minds publishes content on music, visual art, and the mundane oddities of popular consumer culture. Established in 2009, Dangerous Minds is a news and media website-or, according to another interpretation, a clickbait.
What is novel is the increased and organized monetization of viral content that emerges and results from such circulation of data.Įxceptions do apply, of course. Content published in order to bemuse, cheer up, amuse, irritate, and shock has been shared on discussion forums and home page links of all kinds throughout the history of the Web-and, well before, in e-mail, bulletin board systems (BBSs), and Usenet newsgroups. That this attention economy is elaborate, is finely attuned, and operates at expansive scales and speeds is not to say that its principles of circulation and distraction would be entirely novel, or that it was suddenly born around 2005 with the coining of the concepts of Web 2.0 and social media.
This is explicitly the key aim of clickbaits that feed, and live on (and off), Facebook and Twitter traffic generated through eye-catching headlines and visuals promising affective jolts, shivers of amusement, interest, and fascination. From the perspective of the platforms in question, content that grabs is valuable in its stickiness that makes users pay attention. The logic is not altogether dissimilar from that of dating apps where the task is to find attractive options after being presented with a contingent mass of available choices by actors such as databases, social networks, likes, preferences, and algorithms.
When something does grab attention, it leaves some kind of impression, no matter how momentary or minor, that evokes a desire to engage. When browsing through Facebook news feeds, trending tweets, or the top images of Imgur, most content flows by with little effect.
Jodi Dean argues that the search for affective intensities drives the movements of users across social media platforms in search of both distracting thrills and more lingering attachments. Awash with content available at scales too massive for human cognition to fathom, social media revolves around the constant quest of capturing and diverting attention tracking it through the clicks, likes, shares, and recorded visits and monetizing it.