Genius!

I’m a genius! I know because I just took a test on Face Book and they told me so!

The post in my feed said, “Only a genius can see the hidden figure!” then showed a number written in salmon colored, globule style patches on a speckled green background. I saw it immediately, so, to establish my undoubted intellectual superiority over those who couldn’t see the number, I quickly clicked on the link, and lo and behold, the genius that I must be, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of click-bait.

Oh, not the insidious ads that pop up on your screen every search you do, magically presenting your old searches so you can’t possibly continue without some interaction on my part. You know, like clicking on whatever pops up just to see what colors they have. No. I’m talking about click bait. Those are the feeds and sidebars that catch your eye that usually state, “You won’t believe what...” followed by something based on your past searches. Or the other perennial favorite,"Thirty-seven images you won't believe..." 

Trust me, ain’t nothing accidental in the Internet wonderland.

One of the most common bait for clicktraps is the fourth grade English test passed off as “Only one in 100 can pass this test!” then they give you a sentence where their, they’re or there is the proper answer to a meaningless question. I always love to see tests I had to pass to get into Junior High School being passed off as intellectual prowess! Good ol’ Southwest High School. Or was it West Miami Jr High? Maybe it was Olympia Heights elementary! I remember Mr. White in sixth grade explaining gerunds, and Mrs. Saunders in tenth grade trying to unravel the three year reign of confusion with a frustrating but memorable lesson on present participles.

Amazing, I can conjugate a verb – within reason – and always remember loose with two “Ohs” is the opposite of tight! Hey, I nail quite a few of those tests, and even share the results with thousands and thousands of new fans around the world.

According to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

• “Clickbait  - is a pejorative term for web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks.[ Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make readers curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.”

• "From a historical perspective, the techniques employed by clickbait authors can be considered derivative of yellow journalism, which presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines that include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism”
  

My very favorite click-bait, though is the first one, where color vision is misrepresented  to represent intelligence instead of visual acuity. Since – or is it sense – I have 100 percent color accuracy, I got to twist wires together for the Air Force and later a computer manufacturing company that no longer needs people like me since they no longer make computers.

Regardless – or is it irregardless, since that strange aberration has now been added to Webster’s Dictionary as a real word – geniuses with my native ability have been relegated to taking meaningless tests on Face book and supplying data mining companies around the world of our likes and dislikes, much less our friend’s lists and all their – or is it they’re? - contact info.

But, hey I’m a genius. Facebook told me so!

George