Have you ever noticed the similarities between the current crop of business articles that pop up in linkedin and the articles that usually appear in Cosmo magazine?
Supposedly the markets that both venues are catering are quite different, one positions itself as a serious professionally minded social network the other is a women’s magazine thats been around for ages.
But lately if you change the words on the titles its clear that they share a common structure, though different adjectives are used… So if you have a title like 5 ways for better sex, you can have 5 tips for successful business deals.
The content of the articles also share the same superficial handling of their main subjects, and everything gets reduced to unsuspecting easy steps, easy to follow advices that make you wonder how many people should have been able to pull it of easy peasy.
What makes this articles so enticing its that they are mostly a form of entertainment, you read because your brain got enticed by the choice of keywords.
Like most forms of entertainment it depends heavily on fashion and on primal motivators for the choice of subject. It’s all about the need, sex, food, love, money, success. The lipstick, the last big idea, channel n5, big data, Victoria’s secret, cloud.
Here the maxim caveat emptor, buyer beware, it’s fundamental cause if some are nothing more than mindless fun, some do have a purpose. These articles often reinforce trends, adding more buzz so that their masters can cash in through subtle manipulation. This is clearly seen when articles propose products an services as part of the solution.
In many ways this is a way to reinforce cognitive biases that lead to recurrent behaviours, or intended outcomes that are in tune with the wishes of the article’s makers or the writer’s patrons.
I have through the years seen how business magazines content decreased in quality, maybe when I was younger all felt so new that I didn’t know any better. And in current times I don’t see any reversal of this trend.
The internet has actually accelerated it, we have more business entertainment dressed up as business articles. The need to maintain advertisement revenue and keeping visibility for the sake of more hits is a powerful incentive for avoiding anything that hinges on the hard to understand but closer to reality.
Which is a pity cause the world needs more curious insights, informed minds and people with their own opinions and sense of style đŸ˜‰
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