Test – Internship Email Project- 123ABC

The dumb subject line will make sense in a moment!

Dear readers,

Have you noticed an odd trend in your inbox recently in which you receive an email with the subject line “test,” followed a few hours later by another one with a subject line like “oops! We made a mistake” or something similar?

The first time it happened, I assumed it was an honest mistake. I’ve worked on marketing email systems for a few years and know how finicky they can be.

However, it continued to happen… and it persists across various brands.

By the time I had received four or five emails like this, it finally clicked that they were probably not test emails, and they had likely not been sent by accident. They were perhaps actually clickbait campaigns that played on recipients’ voyeuristic desires to see something they weren’t supposed to; a transparent attempt at optimizing email open rates via subtle manipulation.

And that got me thinking. I couldn’t help but ask myself how the concept of “writing for the Internet” has influenced the writing craft.

Throughout the history of the Internet, we’ve seen tools proliferate that started with pure intentions and evolved into money-printing behemoths that have, essentially, dumbed us down.

The Early Internet

Maybe the heading of this section is a little misleading. The early internet that emerged in the late 1960s was primarily a military research and intelligence tool, called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

What I want to talk about instead is the early version of the modern internet, which was born in 1989-1990 at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee’s work introduced the concept of the Internet as a series of interlinked hypertext documents in which documents could be accessed by any nodes (i.e., your massive family computer that had its own room if you were wealthy enough to have a computer in the early nineties)on the network.

The technical jargon is actually pretty simple.

Hypertext refers to information in a digital document that can be clicked or otherwise navigated to go to another document. For example, if you’re reading this post, see a link, and click it… that’s hypertext in action.

If you’ve ever seen HTTP or HTTPS in a web address, that’s something we’ve inherited from how the early internet formed. They stand for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, respectively. (Let’s ignore the fact that it accounts for the “t” in hypertext to be capitalized even though that’s incorrect. It’s still a valid acronym.)

With the early internet, it became possible, essentially for the first time in technological history, for a wide audience to publish documents that reference other documents and can be accessed by nearly anybody, creating a powerful tool for sharing knowledge.

And feelings.

The Golden Era of Blogging

On the heels of hypertext, a few key technological advancements burst onto the scene.

First, there was the emergence of fiber optic cables as a way to facilitate access to the internet. If you were an internet user in the 90s and early 2000s, you know that the internet infrastructure available to us was terribly slow… but it was still light years faster than anything that existed before.

Secondly, computer scientists developed tools that made it easier for the layperson to publish content to the internet. You didn’t have to be a computer engineer or developer to put basic content online.

That’s what enabled the first bloggers to emerge onto the scene.

To cite the most authoritative data source on our modern hypertext highways, Wikipedia:

Inspired by people like Bhatnagar and his blog, Moonmilk, more and more bloggers emerged online to showcase their interests, perspectives, and values. Many early blogs were written as personal blogs on platforms like Open Diary and Live Journal, where individuals could treat the internet as their personal diary, sharing assorted thoughts and reflections as they would the confines of their personal notebooks.

But other blogs were more focused. Politics, philosophy, religion, science, arts, sports, and technology all became popular topics for people to write about. By 2002, blogging was already having a real impact when bloggers brought scrutiny and attention to comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. He had made comments in honor of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond that implied he was in support of Thurmond’s racial segregation policies. Mainstream media outlets paid his comments a passing glance at most, but independent bloggers sounded the alarm, ultimately leading to Lott stepping down as Senate Majority Leader.

By then, blogs were firmly on the scene and starting to compete with print media, challenging newspapers and magazines as the primary news and editorial outlets.

Also in 2002, as bloggers brought a senator to his knees, another advancement entered the blogging arena that, twenty years later (spoiler) would be its death knell: ad networks.

In the Spring of 2002, a platform known as Blogads made it possible for bloggers to integrate ads onto their websites and begin earning revenue. The following year, Google, in a period of rapid growth leading up to their IPO, launched AdSense, which allowed bloggers to tap into its already sprawling AdWords network.

While I don’t often quote Cindy Lauper in these newsletters, this time, it’s pertinent: money changes everything (yeah!) MONEYYYYYYYY CHAYN-JEZ EV-RY-THANG

And change the internet did. Especially in 2003 and 2004 when MySpace and Facebook rose to prominence, bringing a new realm of opportunity to our once-simple hypertext ecosystem.

Marketing Madness & the Attention Economy

In the early 2000s, blogs and social media were very different than they are today. But nurture and nature go hand-in-hand, and the DNA of today’s shitshow was already present, ready to mutate and takeover the Internet like cordyceps spores in an insect.

Expanded access to computers and other internet-connected devices in the 2000s, combined with the newfound ubiquity of ad networks, meant businesses had a massive new channel by which they could reach their target customers.

For social media platforms that prioritized acquiring new users and did not charge for memberships, ad networks were their primary option for making money. More users, plus more ads, plus more time on screen equals profits.

Bloggers were in a similar spot. Bloggers who ran ads on their content quickly realized that the more people who came to their blog, the more money they would make. Assinine personal reflections weren’t nearly as profitable as something exciting, enticing, enraging, engaging, or misleading. (Do you feel misled that I ended that alliterative list with a word beginning in a different letter? Sorry).

Whatever it took to get eyes on a page and keep them there to serve multiple ads became the norm.

For social media platforms, this meant increasing the rate at which paid ads surface on users’ timelines and optimizing algorithms to promote content that generated more engagement, which is usually polarizing and conflict-oriented content.

For blogs, clickbait, content length, SEO and became the keys to creating personal wealth. Here’s where we start to see the rise of things like “niche blogging” with its aggressive emphasis on affiliate marketing and intrusive ads, as well as the good ol’ recipe blogs, which bury (often very basic) recipes under paragraphs and paragraphs of content so that you have to scroll through several ads before getting to the part of the page you wanted to view.

“Writing for the Web’s” Golden Rules (that, Frankly, Make for Terrible Writing)

Writers and bloggers became content creators. Social media users became influencers. Entire jobs and economies developed around all the ways that you can make money on the internet (future newsletter about OnlyFans and writing copy for queerbaiting, maybe?).

As is always the case in massive economies, thought leaders emerged to define how to do it well, and rules emerged as the golden standard in the world of writing for the web.

Here are a few of the enduring rules of writing online. Bias alert: I hate them.

1. Don’t write above a 6th-grade reading level. Keep your writing simple and easy to read. You don’t want your audience to have to think.

2. Optimize for short attention spans.

3. Don’t assume readers will read all your content. Put your most important statements at the start of each paragraph and use clear headings so readers can skim your content.

4. Make sure there’s lots of whitespace—no long paragraphs. Again, people aren’t going to read them and will click away if they see big blocks of text.

Across the board, we’ve shifted our focus from creating valuable, interesting content to optimizing for creating simplistic, shallow content.

Writing for the internet (and for those of us who grew up reading writing optimized for the internet) has led to a reduction in our tolerance for nuance, deep reading, and contemplative reflection. I know very few people under the age of sixty who can stand in line at the grocery store for more than a few minutes without checking their phone and scrolling. Even for myself, it’s a habit I reach for without thinking. Frustratingly, I often find myself feeling like reading is a laborious, difficult process even though I used to devour books as a child.

In my writing, I’ve also struggled to get back to creating content that excites me. Look at that sentence. I even referred to it as creating content rather than telling stories. That’s a trained response, and I caught it almost as soon as I wrote it. Writing in a way that’s experimental or which seeks to capture emotion and sensation rather than tell a simplistic, direct narrative feels foreign (and I think I only do it well these days when under the influence of psychedelics, but that’s a story for another day).

As writers, artists, and patrons of the arts, we have to be intentional about cultivating a sense of taste. We have to be willing to think critically and go deep. Otherwise, we’re contributing to the dumbing down of the arts and the underappreciation for literacy that is already eroding at the critical thinking skills of today’s students.

If you’ve made it this far in the newsletter, good news. Your attention isn’t fragmented. Yet.

Happy reading,
Blake Reichenbach