Issue 27: A Clickbait PSA
Soft Labor, is an occasional newsletter about trends in visual culture written by Sarah Hromack. Soft Labor is a reader-supported publication and I invite you to share this newsletter and subscribe at either the free or paid level. I appreciate you.
This is not a typical issue of Soft Labor — that will come soon enough — but rather a PSA of sorts. Some personal branding couched in mild media criticism. A light flogging, if you will.
For those in New York City, I highly recommend you make your way to MoMA this weekend and catch Shana Moulton’s “Meta/Physical Therapy” before it closes. I — and the rest of the audience I observed — was utterly taken by it, so much so that I wrote about the work and my experience of looking for Hyperallergic. The headline — “The Horrors of Being a Middle Age Woman in a Capitalist Society” — is rather, well, bananas. A few confidantes slid into my DMs and suggested I ask the publication to change it. I declined.
As both an editor and a writer, I came of age in the Gawker era, reading the blog obsessively while working Serious Jobs and earning Serious Degrees. I love a good clickbait headline and have written many myself. Moreover though — and now, more than ever — I appreciate clickbait-as-strategy. Just last month, The Nation published the rather tepidly clickbait-y headline, “The Death and Life of American Media,” which is an essay on just that — one you’ll have to Google by yourself, as I’m only linking to my own shit in this issue. Sorry/not sorry.
Clickbait struck again! I had the recent pleasure of speaking with designer, writer, and rather radically prolific podcaster Jarrett Fuller about the subject of “strategy” for Fast Company. The headline — “Is the rise of strategy the death of design?” — is about as spicy as it gets where design writing is concerned. Fast Company paywalled it, so I’ve attached a PDF — a guerrilla publishing practice that throws much further back than Gawker! See people, strategy.
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