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The 'Mental Headlines' project is fairly new as it only started up in April 2021. It’s safe to assume that most Twitter users follow the page just for fun, but accounts like this are a great way to show how many weird events are happening in the world. A brief scroll through this list may be all it takes to convince you that reality is truly stranger than fiction. Even when we live in a digital age where few things can genuinely surprise us, people (and animals!) still manage to exceed our expectations.
News stories ranging from charming to downright bizarre inevitably lead to funny headlines that are gaining popularity online every day. One reason behind this is that the accessibility of the internet has become a powerful dissemination tool. Amusing news items from far-away places are much more available now, providing entertainment to millions of readers every day.
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To gain more insight into our fascination with weird news, we reached out to Dr. Vincent Campbell, Deputy Head of the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester. According to him, tabloid-style translates very well into the digital world. "The pithy, clipped tabloid use of language suits the rapid clickbait culture of online and social media. Whether that's ultimately a good thing in terms of the quality of news overall is a matter of substantial debate, of course," Dr. Campbell told Bored Panda.
The associate professor pointed out that tabloids and clickbait use similar approaches to attract audiences. "The ease of superficial engagement — the seconds looking at something then clicking to the next thing is a key factor."
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Another thing that changed with the rise of social media is that the readers became fully integrated into the process. "Now the audience does the work for you as a producer, through all the liking. upvoting and sharing. The relative costs of trying to find something that has a wide reach when compared to traditional media content, a Hollywood genre film, say, are also much lower," Dr. Campbell explained.
"Also, lots of scope for things that might have once been much more niche 'weird' areas of interest, trapped in specialist subscription magazines, say, to get out into the wider media environment/public consciousness and achieve far greater reach."
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The catchy and odd nature of these stories sparks our curiosity and boosts our desire to consume them. The best headlines (and the most hilarious ones!) grab the reader’s attention and invite them to a noteworthy adventure. And it’s no secret that getting your headline clicked is hard work. To make an impression on the potential reader, it has to be sharp, accurate, rhythmic, and a perfect tease to the words that follow.
But since it’s often difficult to make day-to-day happenings sound intriguing, it’s much easier to come up with absurd headlines to intrigue the audiences. As Dr. Campbell said, everyday things are rarely news. "Thousands of uneventful plane journeys every day is not news, the occasional plane crash is always news. So, news is kind of predisposed to the unusual, unexpected — even in the routines of things like political news, the search is ever for the latest brewing scandal, or gaffe or what have you."
"Beyond that, given 'serious' news is so often focused on the bad things happening in the world, 'weird' news acts as a kind coping mechanism or pressure valve, offering moments of levity and humor to counterbalance the bad stuff," he added. "Even when stuff is obviously nonsense, it serves in a kind of boundary space between fact and fiction — just as things like the Weekly World News used to do, online media does that now."
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With the right mix of panache and simplicity, it’s entertaining to devour stories that bend the limits of imagination. But they also prove that most things can be considered newsworthy these days. The problem is that with such heaps of stories that grace our feeds every day, we have to ensure we take no information for granted as truth.
According to Dr. Campbell, anything can be news — it's all about context. "Like the recent front page headline in the Metro about Boris Johnson that read 'PM Turns Up for Meeting', as this was quite unusual for Johnson to actually be seen to do his job."
"Headlines are more about attracting the reader, so there's arguably more leeway than in actual reporting, but there can be lines over outright falsehoods, in terms of acceptability if not lines that news media outlets, even mainstream ones, never cross," the associate professor said. People need to become informed and savvy consumers of media and always question the stories they come across.
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Unfortunately, many readers forget to do their due diligence before sharing stories on social media. Researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute published an independent study where they found that 59% of all links shared on social networks have never actually been clicked on — users retweeted the news without bothering to read it.
"People are more willing to share an article than read it," study co-author Arnaud Legout said. "This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper."
