The Boston Marathon tragedy got me thinking about how some folks seem to perk up when there is a disaster to rally around. It seems as if the tedium of their everyday life is refreshed and revitalized when there is another bombing, a new mass shooting, or a fresh natural disaster underway. Sweet! Another incident to fire up my outrage gland, another calamity to immerse myself in, another unfolding television event that will draw me away from doing my homework, folding my laundry, walking Fido.
I’m not sure if the media created this phenomenon or merely reflects it. The unending news coverage that accompanies these events turn into near parodies as reporters strain to deliver substance where there is none (“We’re talking with Jeremy Bloozer whose brother once had homeroom with the suspect’s ex-girlfriend”).
I was in a public area yesterday when a woman entered and shouted, “They got the brother! They got the brother! It’s over, they got him!!” This she screamed to a group of complete strangers; not one of us reacted in any way.
I think some people live for this stuff. I once worked with a guy who could not wait to spread even relatively minor bad news. I specifically remember several years ago when Johnny Cash died, I must have heard him give the notification to a half-dozen co-workers within an hour’s time.
Does anyone else sense this in others? Does it make you uneasy as it does me?
mmm
There just aren’t enough uncapped wells for kids to fall down these days…
I really think people’s reactions to these events has more to do with the media used to follow them. Even with the Internet and social media, we still basically use the same methods to absorb tragedy as we do entertainment. The reaction to both is bound to be similar.
I think many of these people exhibit the same behavior for non-tragic events. They’ll have the same enthisiasm for the release of an album or a sports victory (not that those things can’t be tragic as well).
I blame the media. The media decides what’s important and exciting. When even normally level-headed NPR devotes an entire day to news coverage over something, it makes one think, “OMG. I should be paying attention to this! And so should everyone else!” This happens even when the drama doesn’t directly affect you and it’s happening far away. If Anderson Cooper says it’s important, well by golly, it must be!
I’m as guilty as anyone else. During the day at work, I will check Yahoo! news headlines just to break up the monotony. Yahoo! has me trained to jump up whenever they plaster the top of the page with that yellow attention bar. “SCHOOL SHOOTING IN TEXAS. 50 CHILDREN BELIEVED TO BE KILLED.” That shit is like a shot of pure caffeine. Fifty fucking children?! And the shooter is still on a rampage? It would be different if the story was already over and done with by the time you heard about it, but no. It’s still unfolding. This and the fact that it is in no way connected to you makes it feel more like a riveting TV show than a real life tragedy.
People are desperate for conversation fodder. Weather and sports get old. Politics is often inappropriate or risky. People go to work to escape their family life, not to talk about it. So the news gets covered a lot in small talk. A good old-fashioned school shooting can prompt all kinds of interesting dialogue that another episode of “The Biggest Loser” just can’t.
I don’t blame the media (well, I do blame the media, but only indirectly), I blame primate evolution.
Seriously, it’s in our primate nature to band together in smallish social groups and help each other survive during crisis. It’s so important to the survival of our species that our bodies release huge levels of hormones that make us feel really good - first adrenaline and then oxytocin. Same hormones that are released before and after sex.
In our “natural” state, there’s always some sort of crisis, about to be crisis or just was crisis to deal with. So we evolved to like that wash of hormones.
We don’t have enough to worry about in terms of bare survival anymore, so true life and death crises that affect more than a single person at once are rare. When they happen, we react like we always have - we band together, we spurt out lots of adrenaline which allows us to pull down barricades and run a few more miles and lift heavy people, and then when the crisis is handled, we ooze oxtyocin, which helps us fall in protective love with the people around us so we feel like it was worth it and we’ll do it again next time.
Viewing from afar (which is where I blame the media) still gives people that hormonal process, only they don’t have any barricades to move, so people expend that energy in outrage, prayer, making news reports and message board postings.
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That shit is like a shot of pure caffeine.
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I’m thinking grooving on tragedy and enjoying being the bearer of the latest news, are really two different things entirely. At least to my eye.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the 24/7 news cycle enables/emboldens these evil people, in some way. Stop saying things like, “Blaze of glory”, and “biggest manhunt in US history”! I seriously doubt that’s helping, even if accurate. It seems like they are giving these sickos just what they were after, to me.
Also maybe it’s time to step back from making them famous/infamous. Stop using their names, over and over till we all know it by heart. The name should be mentioned once in the print media and then entirely avoided thereafter. These persons should be referred to as ‘the murderers of…’, I think, ever after.
I was thinking about this too. I think a lot of people crave excitement, hence the popularity of disaster/Armageddon movies, or even action movies where the world is at stake. There’s this anime series, “The Melancholy Of Suzumiya Haruhi”, where the main character thinks the world is boring and hopes for aliens, time-travelers or psychics.
I have to admit, there’s ‘something’ I felt when 9/11 was happening. I felt bad and gave blood that day… I REALLY cared about the victims. But I can’t deny that I felt something in my belly. I think it was excitement, I’m ashamed to admit.
I think a lot of people’s, (maybe boys especially), adrenaline pumps up when they see something like that. I don’t watch many action movies, but I would liken it to that. I also dreamed that I was at the WTC, and was a hero of some sort.
The recent bombings did nothing for me though. The man-hunt was a little exciting.
edit:
Yes, it was a little like watching a movie, but it was real. I don’t like action flicks because I never feel a sense of danger.
I wonder what happens when the (industry) people who make the news “get off on it?”
If they’re the ones who source to said millions, what in the heck happens to “the news” when their (possibly vicarious) bias or spin sets not only the subject, but the trajectory? :dubious:
The media needs just a little more blame, though, in using their understanding of that primate evolution in how they feed us information. They try to scare us. They will choose the words and the tone that will have the most emotional impact on their viewers. A concerned and adrenaline-filled viewer will keep watching to know what else might happen, to know whether it’s going to get worse.
It’s what all of advertising is about, really. Knowing our buttons and pushing them. It’s just too bad that “news” is more about those buttons than about actually getting information out there. I don’t know if it’s always been that way or if it’s changed… maybe it’s just gotten more efficient. Either way, it’s a big reason I prefer to read my news rather than get it from TV. The language can still push my buttons, but the panicky news anchors can’t.
There are just people who thrive on drama, whether it’s in their family, their job, or the national news. They want people to PAY ATTENTION to them, because THEY CARE, DAMMIT!! If nothing dramatic is happening, they’ll make it happen.
People like that predate the social media age. My mother has a “friend” well into her 70s who has apparently been like that her whole life, mourning JFK as if he were her own husband (when her own husband did die, I’m amazed she didn’t strongarm the governor into declaring it a statewide Day of Mourning).
My sister also has an ex-friend in her 50s whose life was a little too calm and so tried to liven it up by pitting my sister, her ex-husband, her new SO, and SO’s ex-wife against each other, but luckily all four wrote her off as batshit insane and have ignored her ever since.
I don’t know why some people are like that, but I do know I wish it was permissible to repeatedly slap them with moldy dish towels while blowing airhorns in their ears.
If they just reported the news without all the sensational staging, maybe people’s sense of perspective wouldn’t be so crazy.
How many us live within a close radius of a fertilizer plant, oil refinery, or another kind of operation with a high explosive potential? Probably a lot of us. But the way the news is presented to us, you may be tempted to think we have more to fear from terrorists than the fuck-up factory down the street. Or that being maimed by bombs is more tragic than being injured some other way. The news determines who receives outpouring of support and who doesn’t. If it doesn’t show up on Anderson 360, it must have not been that big of a deal. No donation for you.
I don’t think it’s natural for humans to go into high alert mode as frequently as the media would like for us to. And I’m thinking we will one day see the news media becoming even more selective about what kinds of tragedies it deems worthy of mass mourning. Missing pretty white woman? Nah. Unless she’s connected to a political scandal or an important person’s wife, we don’t want to cover that story. School shootings with single-digit body counts? And no one got shot in the face while protecting a room full of special-needs children? Well, we’ll put that story in the backpages. Unless you’ve got a picture of a cute toddler with blood on his face. That’s money!
I have a deep, abiding interest in the dark side of humanity. I don’t crow about bad news to other people, but I will admit to being *extremely *morbidly fascinated when crazy people do crazy shit.
Ugh. You have just described my cousin. I joked to my sister yesterday that whatever would our poor cousin post about on FB now that the suspect has been caught, but the reality is, she’ll always find something. There isn’t an illness on earth she hasn’t been tested for (and the tests are never negative; they are ‘inconclusive’). Not a death of a distant acquaintance of a near-stranger that she doesn’t publicly mourn. She’ll meet someone for the first time and, the next thing you know, she is posting on Facebook how proud she is to call that person her friend. This whole bombing thing made her insufferable to the point where I finally hid her posts again.
Shortly after the shootings in Columbine High School, I remember seeing they were sending high school kids from Columbine around the US, wearing their Columbine t-shirts and speaking to other high school kids.
There was something distasteful about those kids sort of milking the sympathy cow by turning this shooting into a cottage industry of sorts - using it as an opportunity to get standing ovations for being in the same building when others got killed. Maybe I was just being too cynical, but in one article I read it seems some of these students were going on tours and being treated a bit too much like rock stars.
What’s struck me is that these tragedies are marketed by the news machines – they get named and logoed and every real or drummed up development is treated as the latest installment in a breathless drama. It allows those so inclined to feel like they were a part of a newsworthy tragedy by virtue of sitting on their ass in their den.
And it has infected everything, even weather. I was dumbfounded when the weather bureau (or whomever) announced that they will now name every storm. (They used to reserve this for hurricanes, so you knew, if it had a name, it was at least potentially serious). What is the point of that other than to make any typical storm seem more threatening. “ARCHIBALD IS COMING!!!” So now we have school closings and disruptions of all kinds based on the mere anticipation of bad weather (which at least twice locally in this past winter never actually materialized).
