The Thumbnail-Trust Ratio
1.
A big reason I feel, for why people naturally nowadays are engaging in mass consumption of online content is the role of thumbnails. This is not any new revelation, but it's the way their design has become homogenized to the extent that their format is almost always the same. Even just the word thumbnail carries the image in at least my mind, which I feel would carry in many, the face of a YouTuber holding hands to their face, mouth agape, eyes splayed out wide. All looking like the man from The Scream. To a part that I think is more influential than I think the common general understanding of them to be, as it’s a form of engagement with already consumed media that thumbnails function to. A thumbnail’s role is in complete relation to trust.
It feels now that YouTube will recommend you videos you’ve already watched, they don’t care (and we should never assume they have) about you watching anything new, it’s actually such a naive thing to believe that they have any other goal about from user retention, advertisers, and engagement. The Thumbnail-Trust ratio is the leverage it has over a user. And while yes I’m speaking of its importance, what is equally if not more influential is when users are not familiar with a thumbnail. When much of consumption is based on a visual gauging and then deducing your own level of trust/want, the lack of a visible relatable thumbnail, with no past information able to work with it, it forces the user on a subjective emotional level to make a (heavily) skewed decision *based in part by the Thumbnail-trust ratio* to engage in repeatable consumption. Watch the same video as before enough times until you build up a level of guts to entertain yourself with something new. One of the greatest feats of confidence no coward could ever dream of achieving. It’s why this trend of “X in X minutes'“, compilations of clips from shows or other moments are so popular. They operate on familiarity. You stick to the repeatable consumption, just cut and compiled into different forms.
2.
Online entertainment media has created a want for newness and novelty only if it is within the relations of trust, the insane level of intimacy they have built with their pre-existing objects of consumption. The thumbnail-trust ratio just acts as one of the little factors that are at play. It is new pig slop only if it looks like it tasted before. Looks here are integral because it’s easy to keep sticking with ones that look more familiar to the thumbnail-trust ratio. It’s making a decision based on information that in no way can accurately express the information of subjective entertainment you desire unconsciously or consciously.
Gone are the days of reading a newspaper to find a timeslot for a movie that only conveyed what it could possibly offer via a title, cultural discourse/reviewers, or a small info description box. But on YouTube or any other social media platform, there is really no need for that level of description for content so trivial, so assumingly unworthy of a need to justify its existence by institutions and accredited individuals. Unless it’s the comment sections. Users are there to produce everything they can via the field of oratory digital discussion. A greater reason why more and more people read the comment sections either after, during, or before the video plays is telling of the fact that people are obsessed intimately with what they consume.
3.
This serves as a form of entertainment parallel, simultaneous, but most importantly it is additive to the consumption value at play. It operates at such a necessitive level as it feels more than habitual, it’s instinctual. Instinct has to be reinforced by the level of achievement of hours and days, and years of wasted but invested time, into everyone’s personal art of media consumption. Your practices now are honed by your mountainous hours spent training your eyeballs to move across a screen, fingers tapping intermittently. The way we consume media has to be understood from its more passive lens, as yes the internet’s devices and platforms create a more active process from the user. But it is not pure agency, it’s still tied to one thing. Especially as for so much of the time, media is consumed in a multitasked manner. Despite its visual and auditory element, more likely the visual is replaced by the spectacle on your phone, only the audio of the multimodal consumption seeps through. Overstimulated to stimulate nothing at all, a sort of numbness..
There’s a really good part from McLuhan talking about the dental device known as Audiac.
“Battle shock created by violent noise has been adapted for dental use in the device known as audiac. The patient puts on headphones and turns a dial raising the noise level to the point that he feels no pain from the drill. The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single extended, isolated, or “amputated” sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users. For the central nervous system rallies a reponse of general number to the challenge of specialized irritation.”
Now we weaponize technology and entertainment media as our own audiacs, drilling ourselves in every sensory manner.
