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If the Supreme Court has closed off the constitutional argument against forced exposure to television and other media in public places (our thanks to “von Hindenberg” for pointing out the case), then where shall we turn?

It seems to Dr. Boli that, in our current legal and intellectual climate, there is a way forward for the media-sensitive.

First, we must recognize that there is such a thing as media sensitivity. Some people cannot concentrate on a task if there is a television flashing moving images or a loudspeaker droning drivel; no matter how much they dislike the programming, they find their attention monopolized by the thing that is, after all, specifically designed to attract their attention. Such people may be described as media-sensitive: they have a reaction to media in the same way that people sensitive to urishiol have a reaction to poison ivy. This media sensitivity is a disability: it prevents them from functioning normally in situations where their attention is required to be elsewhere. If, for example, you find it impossible to fill out a form in your doctor’s waiting room because a television is begging you to watch an exciting baking contest, then you suffer from media sensitivity that prevents you from succeeding with tasks that are straightforward for the apparently normal people around you who can ignore the television in the room.

Once we have forced the recognition that media sensitivity is a disability, then our next step is simply to demand the enforcement of the laws that already protect people with disabilities. The media-sensitive must be granted reasonable accommodation. And, as we have found in many other contexts, making the world more accessible to people with disabilities has the unintended side effect of making it more accessible to everyone else as well.

Dr. Boli does not pretend that the struggle will be easy. He predicts that the average office with public-facing television screens would resist pushing the off button much more vigorously than it would resist spending a hundred thousand dollars for a wheelchair ramp. But victories are won by the patient and persistent; and, in the words of an old Danish proverb, “No one ever yet won the day by snoring.” The time to begin the struggle is now.

Our old friend Father Pitt found this tombstone thus decorated in a pre-Revolutionary graveyard south of Pittsburgh. He suggests that there are two possible conclusions:

1. The experiment was a failure.

2. The experiment was a success.

Neither conclusion is consoling.

Abstractions are useful to academic writers, because a writer can use them to spin out an article to the desired word count without needing any definite knowledge. Here is a sentence from the Wikipedia article on Necker Island (Hawaii):

This difference in form represents an earlier iteration of Hawaiian monumental architecture that offers a unique perspective on cultural norms prior to the abandonment of Necker.

We are talking about how the temple structures on Necker Island and Nihoa differ from those on the main islands in the chain. It has the appearance of an informative sentence. But did we learn anything? Probably not. Strip away the adjectives and the modifying prepositional phrases and what do we have? A difference that represents an iteration that offers a perspective. You will notice that the cultural norms are not described, and you will have trouble finding them anywhere in the article. The difference may be offering us a unique perspective, but since we do not know what the perspective is, we cannot take it up on its offer. We do not know how this perspective differs from the perspective we might otherwise have, which was not described either. The sentence suggests two perspectives but gives us none. In effect, this sentence is twenty-six words of no information at all.

If, therefore, you find yourself in a situation, like graduate school, where you are required to turn out a large number of words to demonstrate your knowledge of a subject, remember that you are judged more by the number of words than by the knowledge. Take this sentence as your model, and you can fill any word count and meet any deadline.

Arlington, Texas.—Explorers returning from Texas have reported that the city of Arlington, having graduated from a suburb of Fort Worth to the fiftieth-largest city in the United States, has begun to develop a suburb named Arlington of its own.

The answer to yesterday’s Puzzle Time feature:

© OpenStreetMap.

Brady Street (marked in yellow on this map) connects Forbes Avenue to Second Avenue, unless it is closed for maintenance of the various layers of viaduct above it, in which case it is preferable to have been born on the other side of the Parkway.

Both “Mrs. Bat” and “Heavy Equipment Heloise” proposed the Brady Street solution, though Heloise dismissed it in favor of more technical approaches to the problem.

Mrs. Bat proposed her answer in the form of a question: “Any problem with taking Brady Street?” This is a question to be posed to the Department of Public Works before attempting to navigate Brady Street. There may be several different answers for any given day, depending on time and bureaucratic mood.

© OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, and Mapcarta.

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On this map of part of the Soho section of Pittsburgh, find your way from Forbes Avenue to Second Avenue.

Proper attire is requested at the All Cardinals Cocktail Hour and Mixer this evening. If you have not brought proper attire with you, red T-shirts will be available at the entrance to the Pius IX Memorial Cocktail Lounge.

Cardinals are reminded that cell phones are not permitted within the conclave bounds and must be left with the Pontifical Curator of Electronics. A copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia is available in the break room to settle arguments about historical trivia. The Angry Birds station we set up for the 2013 conclave is still available next to the coffee maker, and we have been informed that there are no lines this time around.

The kitchen staff have asked us to inform cardinals that the chicken à la King served for today’s lunch was the best that could possibly be made under the circumstances. If you did not like it, you are welcome to come into the kitchen and make your own chicken à la King.

Today’s papal ballot is sponsored by the Mackey Print Paper Company, manufacturers of fine papers for more than a century and a half. When you need paper that combusts evenly with a thick, visible smoke, you need Mackey Print Paper. Ask about our scented collection.

In football news, or “soccer” for our American brethren, the Byzantine Bulls tied with the Maronite Marvels today, with four cardinals suffering minor shin injuries on each side.

Here is a headline from the front page of the Pittsburgh Press, May 5, 1925:

Governor Vetoes Measure to Raise Salaries of Judges

Here is a headline from a news site yesterday:

This common phrase is widely misused. Is it worth salvaging?

Can you spot the difference in technique?

The first headline is designed to give you all the information you might need, in as few words as possible, to decide whether you want to read the article.

The second headline is designed to obscure the information you would need to decide whether you want to read the article. You must click on the headline to be taken to the article before you know whether it lives up to your expectations.

The first puts the reader in charge. The second is pure manipulation. It is designed to make you do something you might not do if you had enough information to make an informed decision.

We did not pick an especially egregious example of clickbait. We picked an example nearly at random, but one that demonstrates the technique.

The economics of Internet advertising have brought us to this point.

In a printed newspaper, if you are seeing the headline, you are seeing the page with the article and any advertisements the newspaper has sold on that page. If it is the front page, and you are reading one of those newspapers with no ads on the front page, then the articles will probably continue on an inner page. But by that time, the headline itself and the top-down structure of traditional newspaper articles guarantee that you know you want to read that article. Ad revenue depends mostly on one figure, which is the circulation of the newspaper. How well people like the paper as a whole determines how valuable the advertising space inside it is.

In an online news site, ad revenue depends on individual clicks. The more times you make a reader go to a separate page, the more ad space you have to sell, and the more likely the reader is to click by accident on one of the ads and earn you a penny. Some readers may perhaps even deliberately click on an advertisement—but even those readers have more advertisements to click on if you make them go to a separate page.

With profit, and indeed mere survival, at stake, news sites need you to click on that headline. They begin to learn what makes you more likely to click. They take note of which headlines were most effective at bringing in the clicks and try to distill the essence of clickability from them. Detailed statistics show them what works and what leaves readers cold and clickless. Slowly the editors learn how to manipulate readers into doing what the editors want the readers to do. Slowly, by imperceptible stages, their profession changes from journalist to con artist.

Eventually the contrast with the old way is stark. A printed newspaper offers its readers something to read: they can choose how they want to inform themselves, to entertain themselves, to exercise their minds in their own way. A news site manipulates its readers, and must manipulate its readers to survive.

That necessity has grave implications for the whole business of journalism. The most effective way to manipulate readers is with strong emotions; and long experience has proved to the clickbait artists that, once the cute-animal stories of the day are exhausted, the most effective emotion at producing the clicks is anger. Bit by bit, the editors of news sites learn how to make their readers angrier. With click revenues constantly in front of them as a scorecard, they learn how to make us hate each other. They herd us into hostile packs of extremists. They become angry extremists themselves, and their readers applaud them, because the general-interest newspaper that appeals to all sides has been killed by clickbait. Eventually the headlines reach a peak of clickbait perfection: “These Jews Held a Secret Meeting. What They Decided Will Turn Your Stomach.” We didn’t start out to become Nazis: we were forced into it by economics.

What can we do? The dollar is God; it decrees whether news sites live or die. But we, as individuals, control the pennies that make up those dollars. “If we could change ourselves,” as Gandhi said (in a phrase that is usually mutilated into bumper-sticker quotability), “the tendencies in the world would also change.”

The way to change ourselves is wonderfully simple. When we see clickbait, we don’t click on it. The next time you see a headline so intriguing that you can’t possibly resist clicking on it, resist it. Remember that it was crafted specifically to make you do something you would not otherwise do. It is as important to resist this as it is to resist the telephone con man who tells you there’s a warrant out for your arrest or that someone has ordered an iPhone on your Amazon account. Then, once you have passed it by, the sun will shine and the birds will sing, and you will realize that the world is more beautiful without whatever article it was that you didn’t read.

By the way, what was the common phrase that is widely misused? Dr. Boli has no idea. He didn’t take the bait.