’I Urge You To See This...’. Clickbait as One of the Dominant Features of Contemporary Online Headlines

Abstract

With the arrival of the Internet the already-existing mass media have undergone a completerevolution. Among the most affected subtypes one could easily distinguish the press, which had tofind its own place within the new medium. The fierce competition in the realm of online publishinghas engendered a number of idiosyncratic linguistic devices used to lure the readers. One of themost popular ones is the phenomenon recognized as clickbait, i.e. an umbrella term for a number oftechniques used to attract attention and arouse curiosity. In the following paper, we shall investigatethe presence of the said phenomenon in online headlines. In order to do that we shall perform a cor-pus-based analysis of the data acquired from the most popular American social news outlets on theInternet, namely Buzzfeed, TMZ and E!Online. Apart from establishing the extent to which clickbaithas dominated online headlines, we shall also pinpoint and discuss the specific linguistic techniquesused to attract potential readers.