The Domination of the Title: Killing Critical Thinking before it’s Born

Abstract

 Abstract — The rapid evolution of technology determined a wide accessibility of the Internet. From using Internet only for work to using it almost at every hour this tool is now as an extension of our brain. This favored changes in our mind as: shortage of our attention, loss of focus, skimmed reading and a constant desire for instant gratification. One of the unfortunate consequences is that people do not have patience to read a long text anymore. We know that online texts have to be in short paragraphs, with bold keywords and with a lot of images nearby in order for them to be taken into account by users, but there is a phenomenon that is more severe than that. More and more people are reading only the title of a text and they think they have the sufficient information. We discuss about a tyranny of the title, of which media and advertisers are taking advantage. By creating a title that seems to tell all the story and attaching a photo to it (that it can even not be real), these entities mislead the readers and make them believe that they are informed and that they understood the story. This paper’s aim is to present a corpus analysis of the comments of newspapers’ news on social networks and prove that most of them are not connected to the content of the article. In the same time, we try to find explanation for this dangerous behavior that affects people’s critical