Why I rarely panic.
Hi everyone. Leo, Notenboom here for Askleo.com. It
should be obvious I think I've got a fairly laidback style.
I don't have the excitable reactions
that honestly get a lot of attention on video.
It's to my detriment when it comes to promoting videos.
A lot of people look for more energy,
more excitement, more panic in the information that they consume online.
As you know, clickbait headlines are
the things that get people to click through and view things.
Several years ago, there was a story about
a flaw that could be exploited by hackers
to get into just about any PC at the time, it was a flaw called heartbleed.
It actually was, if I remember correctly.
It was actually a flaw or a vulnerability
in the actual processor of many different machines.
Now they're us a lot of press about this,
a lot of clickbait headlines that really made it seem like it was the end
of the world or the end of computing, that everybody's machine was at risk
and that all of a sudden everything would fall apart.
Needless to say, years after the fact, that didn't happen.
It was a serious problem.
Don't get me wrong.
The issue was something that warranted a serious investigation and serious
understanding by people who would be responsible for repairing the issue.
Here's the problem that after the inundation of all these
different news stories and all of the clickbait headlines and all
of the fear and panic and fear, uncertainty and doubt, right.
FUD surrounding this issue,
there was almost nothing that you or I, as average consumers, could do.
Nothing.
There just wasn't. Sure you could stop using your computer.
But that also wasn't really very realistic.
Other than just paying attention to what's happening to our accounts, our banks,
our credit cards, all that kind of stuff, right?
The stuff that we should be paying
attention to anyway, there was nothing more we could really do about this.
The folks who were most impacted were
the folks who deal with servers, online servers.
There were issues where one website could potentially see what was going
on in another website at a very, very weird level.
The bottom line, though, is that you and I had nothing to do.
And yet we were faced with all of these
headlines about what would be the end of the world.
The folks who were responsible,
the server maintainers, they were on it, they dealt with it, they fixed it,
they took the patches, they made the changes, they did the whatevers.
So that ultimately it ended up having no effect.
The big thing here is that there's
a really powerful incentive to make headlines as clickbaity as possible
because that's where the money comes from when you publish an online article,
when you publish a video, when you publish just about anything
online these days, the goal is to get people to look at it.
What that means is they have to click on the headline.
They have to read the story.
They have to open up the web page, watch the video, whatever.
The way you do that as an online publisher
is to make your headline as sensational as possible.
Granted, this isn't necessarily something new.
This applied to previous media as well.
Newspapers and magazines, they all have this.
In fact, if you remember the old newsletters that were available at grocery
store checkout stands, they were full of this kind of stuff.
But it's still very true and perhaps even more monetized today than ever.
There's a huge incentive to have really scary headlines because those are
the kinds of things that people will click on.
Those are the kinds of things that people will panic over.
Panic never, ever helps.
It just doesn't.
Panic leads to an extreme sense
of urgency, which in a sense kind of makes sense for some levels of issues.
There are things where when they happen,
yeah, you want to move a little bit more quickly than you do for other issues.
Panic isn't necessarily the way to make that happen.
But panic is certainly one of those things
that can be used to develop this sense of urgency.
The problem is that extreme urgency leads to really bad decisions.
For example, maybe somebody did stop using their computer because of this problem.
There was no need.
But because of what they read in the headlines, they may have been so
scared of what they had been reading that they were afraid to do anything at all.
I have seen people make some really, really bad decisions out of panic when
those really bad decisions didn't need to be made at all.
My advice?
Be aware.
Pay attention to the news, to the headlines, but be skeptical.
Understand the motivation behind so many of these headlines.
Understand why it is so important not
to present you information that is potentially factual or well reasoned.
But it's really important for most media
outlets to publish things that you'll click on.
That means headlines will be
oversensationalized and often downright misleading.
The definition of clickbait means that when you click on a headline,
you come to an article and you are disappointed.
The article doesn't match the headline.
This doesn't really even have to be
that the article could in fact match the headline.
The article could be even more paranoia and concern and fear and panic.
Be skeptical.
Understand that nine times out of ten, heck, 99 times out of 100,
when we see these stories published about technology, about computers,
about vulnerabilities, about bugs, they're not the end of the world.
They're not nearly as severe as they are made out to be.
The system generally works, be it through updates,
be it through things that do and do not actually impact you.
That skepticism is your single best tool to make sure that you don't make decisions
that are unwarranted, that you don't make decisions out of fear and panic.
For updates, for comments,
for related links and more on this topic and this issue, visit Askleo.com/14069.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.