Clickbait and Virality: The Origin Story | Tim Wu

Columbia professor Tim Wu came to the Big Think studio to talk about clickbait. What happened next will shock you. Wu's latest book is "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" ().
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Transcript - So there’s a fellow named Jonah Peretti who is somewhat famous as the founder of BuzzFeed whose role in inventing virality or pushing virality in click bait has an important role in our present. Jonah was a graduate student in the early 2000’s at MIT’s media laboratories and he had this amusing situation where he ordered a pair of Nike shoes from the custom Nike shoe shop. And then they said well what do you want to – you’re able to put whatever you want on it. And he wrote sweatshop because he wanted that. And Nike wrote him back and said well you can’t use sweatshop. It’s an inappropriate slang. And he said that’s not inappropriate slang by the law, it’s a real word and so forth. So then they just canceled is order and he said can you send me a photo of the Vietnamese girl, ten-year-old, who’s making my shoes. Read Full Transcript Here: .