“No You Are Not Racist if You Do Not Support The Black Lives Matter Movement”
“Why Service Trips Are So Important”
“10 Ridiculous Things That Our Generation Gets Mad Over”
For many reasons, Odyssey never appealed to me. The choice headlines above illustrate a few. Primarily, I prefer not to consume media centered on the word “millennial”—the concept has been done to death by "The Atlantic", Tumblr and combative Reed alumni on Facebook. And I say consume because that’s what this is. Click-bait primarily serves to confirm, not inform. In online discourse, providing a link implies at least some validation because, hey, someone somewhere agrees. This makes the online publishing of raw opinions lucrative; it creates a market of relatable content based on maximizing page views. Page views mean ad revenue. Platforms like "Odyssey" churn out thousands of weak articles for profit, which in turn support thousands of unfounded claims on social media daily. To the publisher, it doesn’t matter what the articles say, as long as people click on links to the articles.
So, why did I agree to write click-bait? Shouldn’t it bother me that Odyssey is a pyramid scheme, designed to cash in on social media-savvy students’ ability to self-promote? In short, nah.
It doesn’t matter that the “About” page, copied word-for-word below, is a cringeworthy series of buzzwords and that the three articles (lovingly referred to as “content”) mentioned are equally yikes-inducing to me:
“Odyssey is a social content platform that discovers and shares a chorus of millennial voices, amplified organically through people sharing with their friends. The platform empowers its thousands of creators to contribute and share what matters to them and enables content to find its most relevant audience organically. Nearly 90% of Odyssey content is discovered because someone the reader knows shared it with them. Through its proprietary technology ecosystem, Odyssey is revolutionizing content creation and discovery, enabling compelling, high-quality content to be created and discovered at speed and scale.
Content ideas are chosen by creators and relate to any and every topic, from “What Being Pro-Israel Means” to “We Need to Respect Law Enforcement Again and Here’s Why” to “Why Girls Love the Dad Bod”. Other topic areas include news, politics, fashion, relationships, sports, ideas, tech and future. While some creators are seasoned writers, others are everyday people with relevant ideas or perspectives that otherwise may not be heard.”
The key to my decision is in that last sentence. To Odyssey, “everyday people” means young students and the ideas were “not otherwise heard” because they are often nonsense. Nobody else would publish an article (sorry, content) in which an 18-year-old, white frat boy lists his problems with Black Lives Matter. That’s not a marginalized voice— that’s an irrelevant voice. It embarrasses the older people who better veil their racism, and only confirms to everybody else why the movement is so important.
In any case, Odyssey has an economic incentive to provide a platform to unheard voices. While it has most amplified voices that confirm ignorant viewpoints, it may be an opportunity to dismantle hierarchies. The platform claims to give writers complete creative control. It seeks out the voices of “millennials.” It aims at making its content go viral. Could this be a formula for communicating critiques of dominant power structures? Sure, it feels icky that “subversive” articles would line the pockets of a group of executives who probably couldn’t care less, but capitalism is a system that shackles us regardless of ickiness. The best we can do is neutralize the icky— open the floor to erase voices, voices that represent intersections of oppression, without tokenizing or qualifying those voices. This Odyssey endeavor will be worthwhile if it becomes a forum in which hierarchies of class, gender and race are defied and students really listen to one another.
Few things make this platform different from direct posts to social media. People speak for themselves on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr already. On the other hand, the link-validation phenomenon, referred to earlier, may provide a boost to these voices. Perhaps, retweeting a personal tweet lacks the authority of sharing an article. And isn’t subverting hierarchies all about giving back the authority stripped from the oppressed? This question is far from resolved. Is there something about the shared article format that empowers the speaker?
Maybe click-bait can challenge dominant narratives. Maybe I’ll end up making a listicle of GIFs that Totally Explain Meme Culture at Reed College.
