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Perhaps the key concern of our generation should be learning to avoid emotional overreaction to the media's business model of fear-porn and outrage-porn for cli

• deleted 5y ago
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• fabian2k 5y ago
  We have a major war on our doorstep, a humanitarian catastrophe and very likely millions of refugees. That is certainly a real cause for worry.
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• madacol 5y ago
  The threat/warning Putin said after invading is very hard to dismiss. That was a turning point in my head. I tried to think over and over where was he drawing the line that he wouldn't cross and I got too uncomfortable with my imagination
• Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  There's no contradiction between thinking fear porn is bad and thinking nuclear war is a real and horrible risk.
  • michaelt 5y ago
    Sure. But there are at least 20 things I'm more worried about than nuclear war. You've got to have a very lax definition of 'key concern' to include your 21st-ranked worry.
    • pixl97 5y ago
      There are a lot of things I'm more worried about than an asteroid hitting earth, but I rather we develop technology that could avoid it from occurring because if it does happen it could drive us extinct. You seem unable to comprehend and classify that there are existential threats and that you have to focus on them some but not too much.
  • sonnyblarney 5y ago
• saboot 5y ago
• res0nat0r 5y ago
  COVID was the cause of the deadliest event in US history.
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• yed 5y ago
  People give a shit now because it’s a major escalation with a nuclear power. That was not true with their invasion in Georgia or the previous incursions in Ukraine. This is a genuinely newsworthy and alarming event, I’m not sure what you expect the media to do when things like this happen.
  • daenz 5y ago
    The Boy Who Cried Wolf comes to mind. When everything is an emergency, nothing is.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      Someone who always cries "sheep" and keeps asserting genuine issues are "just the flu" or "Russia won't invade" is similarly problematic.
      • daenz 5y ago
        Whataboutism. The answer to one problem isn't to say "but what about this other problem." The problem we're discussing here is the endless fear porn on the news and social media.
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          The post upthread asserted COVID and Ukraine were examples of "fear porn". You chimed in with "crying wolf" about emergencies. It's hardly whataboutism to point out that these are actual emergencies, and that media coverage of them should be expected.
          • daenz 5y ago
            That's the point of the "crying wolf" story: the boy cried wolf so many times, that when a wolf (emergency) actually appeared, the townsfolk response was not appropriate. That's the risk you run when every story is hyped up for maximum engagement.
• daenz 5y ago
  I've started to see a lot of burnout on my social media, of posts like "It's ok to take a break from the news" and "It's ok to not participate and focus on your mental health." These are coming from people who are typically very active in the social justice space. The news endlessly shifting from one emergency to another is burning them out, which is saying a lot.
  • ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Infotainment has become very toxic. It's not simply a cold front, its "tHe pOlAr VorTeX". It's not an interesting asteroid, is "cOulD tHiS AstERoiD iMpAct eArTH iN 2027?". Between this and all the blatant manipulation on social networks, it's a necessity to take a break from all this madness before it sucks you into it.
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    • sjg007 5y ago
      There are also extremely successful and highly productive long term disinformation campaigns. I noticed a notable shift in decreased disinformation when the war started and Twitter cut off Russia for instance and similarly even before that when they cut off Trump.
• thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  I agree that we should learn not to overreact, but I also think that social media plays an integral role in the quality (or lack thereof) of our discourse. Research shows that hate is the most virulent type of content that spreads on Twitter and there’s a whole cohort of Twitter employees and investors that have an interest in advancing that business. Same thing with Facebook. There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made by our own industry to drum up this fear and anxiety, we can’t just blame it all on the anchors sitting behind the desks. The platforms are culpable as well.
• thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  To be fair, both COVID and nuclear threats are very legitimate issues. We can’t deny that we are living in a dark period. More Americans have died from COVID than all American soldiers lost in combat in all military engagements combined in our history, and we like our wars. We surpassed that figure last summer, so we’re way past it at this point. We’re also consciously considering the possibility of nuclear war again, which came very close to happening the last time we engaged with Russia.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    I don't think we can clearly state covid deaths were counted correctly. There are many odd thing with the numbers, eg. no-one died of the flu during covid because they were all counted as covid, not to mention the emergency measures (I know of at least 2 european countries where this happened) that allowed even just presumption of covid to be counted as covid deaths, without a proper autopsy or the financial incentive that some hospitals / state actors had in having a certain number of covid deaths in order to get compensation. The age at which people died also matters. If covid just sped up the death of old people we lost significantly less years of life as a society than when young soldiers die. Overall if we focused on improving cardiovascular diseases or traffic related deaths instead of scrambling making emergency vaccines for covid, I believe we would have saved more years of life as a whole. Nuclear threats are just threats - if anyone actually fire nukes both sides would die. They're great for making your enemy panic and don't bother you during invasions, though.
  • ifyoubuildit 5y ago
    > More Americans have died from COVID than all American soldiers lost in combat in all military engagements combined in our history, and we like our wars What happens to that comparison if you look at years of life lost rather than deaths that coincided with a covid infection? I don't know, but I have to assume it's not even close. Covid seemed (in the average case, of course there were exceptions) to push people who were near their life expectancy over the edge, whereas war takes young people with full healthy lives ahead of them and either kills or permanently damages them.
• penjelly 5y ago
  i resonate with your comment every 2 weeks its some new crisis in the news. I try to avoid it because it just consumes my energy and im not contributing to helping anyway. Maybe im jaded but it feels like i should experience the life i have before me, instead of constantly being pulled one direction or another based on 2week news cycle. lately though, i notice that people close to me are soliciting this info to me regardless of whether i ask or not. My whole family, the 2nd topic after "hello" is "X thing happened in the news isnt that crazy!?" and other folks get upset if i dont have an opinion about X thing.
• whatever1 5y ago
  Yes this was Europe's response to Hitler's expansions. Downplaying the situation does NOT help when the aggressor is determined to do whatever it takes to advance their agenda.
• avip 5y ago
  Reflecting on what will be the greater challenge for my kids: avoiding emotional overreaction to the media's business model ...or climate change. Pretty sure it's the later
  • ben_w 5y ago
    20 years ago I’d have agreed. Now? Now my gut feeling is that climate change is mostly going to be OK — bad stuff will still happen, but I don’t expect catastrophic variation from what would’ve happened otherwise, because PV is rapidly growing in quantity (literally exponentially) and batteries are rapidly getting cheaper. Plenty of other unsustainable things about our economy besides greenhouse gases of course. But I’m more worried than I used to be about journalists and propagandists both separately A/B testing their ways to the most potent methods to effect specific emotional affects, at which point we all go to war because of something which despite being objectively stupid is also something which enough people feel is a fundamental truth of nature they’re willing to kill and to die for. A more extreme version of https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
    • guelo 5y ago
      Why would you go with "gut feeling" instead of IPCC AR6?
      • ben_w 5y ago
        The elevator pitch summary of IPCC AR6 is “It is only possible to avoid warming of 1.5 °C if massive and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are made”. I am saying “I think those cuts are extremely likely to happen, and soon”.
        • GekkePrutser 5y ago
          Soon is still a lot later than immediate. And they won't be that large because even cheap PV needs time to be manufactured in large enough quantities to matter.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Or serious problems do exist and for the most part we are shielded from them.
• yongjik 5y ago
  > mass societal panic about Covid If anyone with clairvoyance predicted in 2018 that one million Americans would die from a contagious disease, while a third of the population would go on protesting anti-spread measures and wouldn't even let their kids vaccinated ... ... it would have been widely panned as unrealistic disaster porn aiming to undermine Americans' social trust. Sometimes a disaster is actually a disaster.
  • DamnYuppie 5y ago
    In 2018 everyone who pays attention knew that hundreds of thousands of people in our country would die every year from a contagious disease, also known as the flu. You seem to be of the mind that you can somehow stop the spread of Covid, you can't. We have not been able to stop any respiratory virus from spreading EVER. Your vaccines will only limit the effects of the virus on you if you get it. It will in no way stop you from spreading it.
    • ChefboyOG 5y ago
      No one who pays attention would have predicted hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from influenza, because in the last decade, it has never happened. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html The high-end of yearly flu deaths is in the low 50,000s, while the low-end is just over 10,000. COVID has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. You're not just misinformed about vaccines, you're outright lying about numbers that can be easily Googled.
• deleted 5y ago
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• pessimizer 5y ago
  It's politics driven by access journalism, constant press releases, and simple covert placement of deceptive news stories in tiny outlets to allow larger outlets to amplify those stories under the guise of metareporting. We're currently on the tail end of en engineered media panic about an epidemic of shoplifting. That's just how things are going to be now, people are so cynical about all media that they don't believe anything that comes from anywhere other than their own personal fandoms. But their own fandoms are just injecting the same propaganda directly into their veins. The thing that's been most astounding to me is that the most militant about Ukraine in the US seem to completely overlap with the most Democratic/Republican hyperpartisan types, and each characterize extreme concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine as something that their respective parties own, and identify lack of appropriate concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine with the opposite party; the Republicans are traitorous Trumpian Soviet spies who deserve execution or exile, and the Democrats are peacenik anti-interventionist cowards who are holding back the military. I suspect that's an incidental observation - because the main thing that hyperpartisans and Ukraine hysterics have in common is extreme consumption of television news. Which is why they're so much less concerned about Yemen (which has been pointed out a ton), and why they have no historical background on the situation (because you had to read to know about the constant attempts of NATO expansion to Ukraine and the obvious problems with that, it wasn't something you could just pick up while changing channels.) The analogies between NATO expansion to Ukraine and the Cuban Missile Crisis are lost on people who don't know why NATO exists, and who don't actually know about the Cuban Missile Crisis other than it had something to do with Cuba, missiles, and the Soviet Union. This world is still the same world where decisions are made by royalty, and normal people die to help oligarchs jockey for relative position, but the degree to which murderous nationalistic/partisan rage can be stirred up in a plurality of the populace is intense, and instant.
• sonnyblarney 5y ago
• perfunctory 5y ago
  > We went from mass societal panic about Covid to mass societal panic about Ukraine basically without skipping a beat and few people notice how their energy was redirected so seamlessly. Could it have to do with the fact that covid is the biggest pandemic in hundred years and that the UN Security Council had to call an emergency special session for the first time in 40 years because of Ukraine. If these are not good reasons for "fear-porn", what do you think would be?
  • ithkuil 5y ago
    Sadly it proves the point in a perverse way: we're so used to everything being important that we/some got desensitized and no longer perceive the true scale of things. (The boy who cried wolf, etc)
    • sonotathrowaway 5y ago
      That doesn’t make any sense at all.
      • ithkuil 5y ago
        I agree; it's utterly irrational; yet I literally hear a non small number of people around me living and thinking like that
  • bogota 5y ago
    Covid for 90% of the population was never something to have fear over. Something to be cautious about yes but the range of sheer panic among people under 40 in good health that i met was beyond silly. I don’t trust the media anymore on anything. Every article they print that i have deep knowledge about or insider information on is so wrong as to be malicious. Read the news to get an idea of what is going on but any opinion they present and most facts are pure bullshit.
    • unethical_ban 5y ago
      There was a summer when we didn't know what the hell the virus was going to do. Where hospitals were overflowing so much that if a young person got in a car accident they'd sit in an ambulance. Or if they got the sniffles and hugged their mom they'd kill her. I'm starting to distrust any person who claims to distrust the media over covid.
• fellellor 5y ago
  Man, even if you watch the news you’re quite likely to be affected by the media hype. It’s shameful the kind of control they have over us. What’s even more alarming is that absolute racists can hide themselves easily just by being on the right side of the media hive narrative. Look at how common Russians are being treated by sections of western society just for the crime of being Russian when they probably just escaped to the west from a life under Putin. Capitalism is great, but unrestrained pure profit motive capitalism in some sectors - like journalism - does not look like it’s in public interest. Companies like Twitter just serve up content that can rile people up, with no concern for what it’s leading to. All they care about is engagement.
• klauss 5y ago
  I sincerely don't understand this line of reasoning. Are the negative consequences of overmediatization and people having too much empathy in the moment really what we should focus on? If so what are those consequences exactly? It feels like a counterproductive leveling down argument. Instead of dumbing down every event to its worldly relativistic place, we could seize the opportunities to rise, try to question and inform ourselves and let people who want to rearrange their priorities do so. There is no world roadmap with a ubiquitous world product owner incentivized to handle its rational prioritization.