– I start combing my hair and such... pulling my hair here and such... aaarrghhh... and boom! And do you know what was in her hair?
- Well no.
– 10,000 million pesetas. In the comb, man.
“Amancio Ortega finds 1,108 million euros in his bank account” is a headline from the Huffington Post, undoubtedly inspired by this gag by Faemino and Cansado and ingeniously deceptive, which, by its plausibility, has shown that part of the information consumers stay there, in the two or three lines of body 56 or more and thick lines that head the news. The vast majority of users on X who commented on the tweet did so sarcastically, but without realizing that the figure is the result of collecting dividends. So the sarcasm was lost in the sarcasm.
Users asked the founder of Inditex to return the 1,108 million bizum sent by mistake, to equate it with stumbling upon five euros from the pocket of the winter jacket recovered from the closet, or to note that it is like finding a euro between the cushions of the sofa .
The fact, however, is that more and more we tend to only read headlines and first lines. A 2017 study already indicated that 57% of digital press users responded to this profile. We consume news like we eat sunflower seeds: we spend more time sucking on the first thing that is put into our mouths, the salt from the shells, than on the inner seeds, although that is where the omega 3s are.
The analysis also confirmed that 11% stayed exclusively with the owner. It is a phenomenon that is accentuated as the digital world replaces paper. Remaining only in the headlines can mean becoming misinformed rather than informed. Reading the entire news often takes the same time as spreading and saying stupid things for not having read it.
However, the fault is not attributable only to the reader's apathy. The saturation and constant bombardment of news on networks, web portals and alerts, inputs and information pills, typical of the digital age, contribute to this deficit of interest.
“Amancio is 1,108 million” is, in turn, in the top ten of clickbaits. It is a brilliant headline much superior to “Ayuso and Yolanda Díaz get involved,” for example. A long-failed intended click bait. Or much better than that preview of a Cope news item: “Cristiano Ronaldo's strict diet to stay in the elite: he only eats chicken…”. Chicken, rice and broccoli was what the viral preview did not show. Anything goes...
