I don’t even use Yahoo as a homepage or even a search engine anymore, but with a few misguided clicks I wound up logging out of my Yahoo Mail account and getting directed to the Yahoo main page, a place I have long since abandoned since the breakout of the minimalist and simplistic Google homepage.
Now, I don’t know how the slideshow up the middle of the page works per se. I always thought that it was a collection of some news stories given in a compressed form so a person on the page would be able to see them quickly and be able to go through them just as quickly without getting redirected to the page that housed the story in its entirety. I was caught off-guard, though, when the first story (or object for that matter) I see on the page is a picture of some girl with enlarged eyes and the word “anime” written in bold letters (because the word “anime” always catches my attention no matter what, whether written or spoken).
I admit, I brought a bunch of assumptions to the table when considering how I processed something as simple as getting accidentally redirected to the Yahoo main page. First of all, I assumed that the middle block with the slideshow showed snippets of “news”, and by “news” was thinking about stuff that most of us would stereotypically characterize as important–natural disasters in other countries, political turmoil, the latest crime against humanity or one human in particular, social unrest, etc. In my mind, if you’re a story that’s in the center block of the Yahoo homepage, you must be important. After all, it’s the first thing that my eyes snapped to when I arrived on the page, and I imagine that it’s the same for most people. So then I beg (quite literally, I was screaming to the heavens in my mind) the question, how is the story of a girl who can make herself up to look like her eyes are some kind of genetic malfunction be something that could be considered news? Is it supposed to be important? And another thing, this story was the first one on the slideshow. Literally, it’s the top story; that is, the top of the pile of stories that’s automatically flipped through if you stay on the page long enough. What is it about this story that makes it more deserving of the number one spot over others? Granted, those other stories are about has-beens, ghosts, wigs, and Facebook…so why are these the highlighted stories again?
A couple of reasons come to mind, at least with the anime-eyed teen anyway. With all the stalker-ish monitoring of consumers’ habits and patterns online in order to generate a more personalized online advertising experience, each click and search I make gets recorded and from all that together with my past online activity, predictions can be made as to what I would find interesting, relevant, or important. Even though the computer I was on when I saw this story was one in my university’s computer lab, it’s a particular unit that I always use whenever I’m in that computer lab so I’ve done a fair amount of online activity on that computer. Or perhaps my assumptions of the function of that slideshow in the middle of the Yahoo main page were wrong and the slideshow block is meant for random fluff pieces that could be sort of interesting but not necessarily important. They might not even be connected to me as an Internet surfer at all.
So why the rant? Why should this little tidbit be important and any different than an online piece highlighting the fact that a Ukrainian teenage girl recorded putting makeup on herself in a particular way that made her eyes look super creepy?
To be honest, I cannot begin to speak for that girl and why she recorded that video of herself and put it online. I cannot speak for the editor person or whoever it is that is responsible for picking which stories go up and get highlighted at any given on the Yahoo main page. I can only speak for myself, and I can only hope that to whoever it is that actually hears my voice in this vast and (sometimes) scary ocean that is the InterWebs will take my thoughts with an open mind. And to be honest, those thoughts about this particular thing are not only unformed and erratic, but also innumerable. If any reader will allow (and by that I mean not get super pissed by the anti-climax) I will gather my thoughts and come back to this when I am more focused and directed in order to allow for discussion. After all, it’s a bit of a shame that nowadays we’re just so used to seeing something, having some sort of reaction to it, and then resetting and moving on.
But that’s a whole other thing entirely.
Magic Happens Within These Red Walls 