Participant Spotlight: Anwen Williams
We are pleased to share an essay from SEUT Essay Challenge participant Anwen Williams, a student at Lawrence Free State. In “That’s What Gets the Most Clicks,” Anwen examines how technology and media have warped the way we consume information, reducing complex realities into headlines, statistics, and fleeting viral moments. Drawing on experiences with peers, parents, and educators, Anwen highlights how algorithms reward shock over substance, eroding our ability to think critically. She calls for a cultural shift toward deeper learning, questioning, and conversation — a reclaiming of knowledge from the grip of “what gets the most clicks.”
You can read Anwen’s essay below:
That’s what gets the most clicks.
That’s the mindset of media outlets, reducing people’s names, identities, experiences, and deaths to mere statistics because in a headline, that’s what gets the most clicks. That’s the mindset of influencers, starting videos with the most shocking, controversial sentences, because that’s what gets the most clicks. That’s the mindset of teenage girls and boys, quick to criticize, quick to stereotype, because that’s what gets the most clicks.
I have watched almost all of my friends and classmates repost articles and fundraisers addressing the conflict between Israel and Hamas, but when I ask them who Israel’s political and military leadership is, what the Palestinian Authority is, and what the historical context is, no answers come to mind. I have watched my parents, both with college educations and dozens of years of experience, fooled by a random, misleading video clip that pops up on their phones. I have watched my teachers shocked and dismayed at the tendency of technology to distort and dilute the world around us.
When we live so much of our lives online, we forget that the articles we read, the posts we see, the names and photos that are so easy to swipe past, reflect reality. We see the result of an algorithm that prioritizes what gets the most clicks, and allow efficiency to dictate our own lives.
I have always been dedicated to the process of learning. Eventually, I hope to work for an international think tank and analyze geopolitics from an unbiased perspective—relying on my own research and experience to form a conclusion, rather than accepting the first answer popping up online. But the prevalence of technology in our world makes it so easy to just accept what we’re told or given, defeating our ability to critically think.
As technology continues to develop, it will only grow more fluent at thinking for us. Whether it’s the Generative AI that students are so quick to feed assignments to, or the prevalence of 15-second videos and snippets of articles that catch our attention only to release it as quickly as possible, we are losing our ability to come to our own conclusions because there are so many pre-existing ones for us to clone and copy.
The change starts with us. It’s not enough to read one article, or “absorb” one informational video. If something is a critical problem, a point of interest, understand it. If your peers are speaking on a topic, ask them questions. See what they know. Learn, share, grow together. Educators can support this change through assignments that are not limited to a laptop. Encouraging constant discussion and conversation within classroom settings forces students to interact with the information that is actually processed, instead of being able to have Google summarize it for them or supplement all the gaps.
Think tanks, such as the ones I hope to work for, can continue advertising the engaging experiences they already provide, helping involve societies around the world. They can share humanitarian stories, analyze the international situation from a clear, neutral perspective, and host events that engage audiences instead of just limiting information to a written format. Modern technology is a beautiful way to connect the world, allowing us to understand the lives of people thousands of miles away like never before.
But when misused, when oversimplified, it becomes a weapon of incompetence—a dangerously easy way to remain ignorant while believing that we are generally informed.
We aren’t put on this Earth to figure out what gets the most clicks. We aren’t put on this Earth to stare at a screen and reap none of the benefits. We aren’t put on this Earth to reduce people to a headline, an Instagram story, a five-second video that flees our mind within minutes. We are not put on this Earth to become desensitized.
But if we aren’t careful, that’s exactly what technology can reduce us to.
