1. Signal vs. noise. What draws our attention? Think of two dimensions: threats vs. positive developments; sudden vs. gradual. We seem to be most attractive to the sudden and to the threat. A hurricane is a great story for the media. The way that our houses have become stronger and more secure is not a great story.
2. As L.M. Sacasas put it, we combine the most stressful aspects of the pre-literate oral village and modern anonymous society.
We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.
The “other” is in our face, but is not fully present.
Hey, it’s what made $ for traditional media, and now the skids have been thoroughly greased in Facebook’s and Twitter’s models and it’s what’s made them their billions. Difficult to turn back now, it’s in our psyche.
Arnold, you might be interested in Hugo Mecier’s Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, another one of Princeton University Press’s psychology and evolution books. He says that we are attuned to threats and think highly of people who warn us of real threats. In a Pleistocene band, purveyors of false threats were found out when the threat didn’t happen. If it had, it would be important and everyone would know. But now the threats are usually farther away; many don’t really matter. So there is less check on fear mongering. A threat story can be interesting or entertaining or make you feel good about yourself (e.g., bad people want to hurt good me and my friends) and if you won’t be hurt by believing it, many people will.
Let’s say that people are particularly sensitive to claims about threats, a kind of “threat-aversion-based hyper-attentiveness bias”. This in turn creates bad incentives for all kinds of people and entities vying for either attention and/or intentional public provocation, agitation, or incitement to make less than fully accurate claims about current and future threats, and to promote awareness of less than fully truthful reports about cases and instances that seem to demonstrate the reality of the threat.
Well, one way to deal with that would be to try to refute bad threat-talk claims with good threat-dispelling facts.
Another way would be to increase penalties for the threats themselves. If the threat of being robbed actually goes up rapidly and substantially for some reason, government leaders could react by allocating more resources to detection and prevention, and to making sentences more severe for convicted robbers.
On the other hand, about the worst thing you could do is tell someone who feels threatened because their circumstances or sympathies resemble those of the subject a particular famous public case, “They absolutely deserved it and had it coming, and so would you if we ever discovered what you really thought about the matter.”
To the extent the sensitivity to threats is human nature, it is as it ever was. What has changed is the ability to credibly threaten people in particular ways.
If it’s paranoid and hysterical to be threatened by cancel culture, then all the complaining about it is absurd. If it’s sane and reasonable to be threatened by cancel culture, then trying to focus or pin the blame on threat-sensitive psychology is very much besides the point.
Reminds me of a lecture I once heard by Ralph Wood, a conservative English professor, about *Lord of the Rings*. He pointed out how the One Ring, like the Ring of Gyges, grants invisibility. In Plato’s thought experiment, becoming invisible would enable one to behave immorally. Wood points out that the internet also allows us this same power.
It’s all about escaping social penalties, but sometimes it’s good to be able to do so.
To the extent a society enforces morality, invisibility would enable immorality.
Similarly, to the extent a society penalizes heresy against an orthodoxy, anonymity permits argument that the truth is otherwise.
The problem is, if you just start handing out “get out of social penalties free cards”, every moral, honest, innocent, intelligent, rigorous, and accurate contrarian will be outnumbered ten thousand to one by those lacking at least one of those qualities, and probably lacking most of them.
For the few special cases, there is no public-discourse version of the “witness protection program” for them.
I’ve often speculated had there been a good “white woman missing” story to occupy CNN in the summer of 2015 there’d have been no Trump.
A good post but I think there’s been another change in American media even more noticeable.
At one time you might have had a centrist establishment media, and some left-wing and right-wing elements.
Many today say that the Establishment media has gone woke and become left-wing, and in some regards that’s true.
But I think it is more accurate today to say that Establishment media has become a house organ for the Democratic Party, while some media, such as Fox, are more likely the house organ for the GOP.
This has led to the curiosity of Biden surrounding himself with corporatists and warmongers, but being lauded by the Establishment media.
In Washington today many prominent figures float in and out of media, the current administration or well-paid corporatist jobs as lobbyists, think-tankers and so on.
The threats highlighted in media will be those threats that are convenient for the Democratic Party. See Russiagate. White police officers.
So just got off the phone with a nephew who told me a joke about “cyber bullying the Amish.” Having deleted my social media accounts and gone cold turkey several years ago, he may have been getting a dig in, but really, it’s quite easy to delete your accounts and go back to normal living. And the Amish seem no worse off without social media. If it’s a problem for you, just quit.