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Every time something like this happens people react in quite predictable ways, the creation of Facebook pages is one of the more common ones. Why do people do t

Every time something like this happens people react in quite predictable ways, the creation of Facebook pages is one of the more common ones. Why do people do this? Does it come from social pressure to show just how angry they are with actions, is it just how people cope with terrible news (by doing something even if it's ultimately futile) or is it just another case of humans doing irrational things? My google-fu isn't very good so no results of relevance are coming up, but it seems like there must be a reason behind these reactions.

jerf 14y ago
A combination of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_%28sociology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_%28sociology%29 , probably.+ That actually took some work to Google up. I thought I'd be able to find something specifically about humans faking social signals in exactly this context, but I didn't. Also, "social signalling" is full of results about trying to teach computers how to deal with human social signals, and how to process data from social networks (not quite the same thing). It's a busier term that I thought it would be. (Dramaturgy is a word I'd never encountered before, either, though I've noticed the concept in play in people around me. Not mentioned in the Wikipedia page that I could see, but something you can probably see once you are looking, is that some people act as if they are in a play constantly, but are playing to the wrong audience. I have a relative who acts as if the entire world is a soppy mid-day women's talk show and constantly play up their concern to an audience who is actually pretty OK with, say, a 12-year old riding a bike without having to express concern every time that they are going to hurt themselves. And there's always some people who never seem to leave High School, or at least take a few decades longer than it should to realize that they're not on that stage anymore.)
dkarl 14y ago
I can't offer a psychological explanation, but my impression from the people I know who are the most eager to offer their opinion on the shooter is that they love it, that this is the coolest thing that happened to them this month. They'd be bored without it (or they'd be stirring up drama with their friends or co-workers.) They say they're angry, but they seem more excited and gleeful. Some people love tracking hurricanes, some people love elections, and some people love tragedies. It's a break from their boring lives, a dramatic and important occasion to share some excitement with millions of other people. Like when Princess Diana died -- suddenly a lot of people realized that she was really, really, really important to them. (Not that she wasn't important to a lot of people, but there were also plenty of people who were determined not to get left out of the excitement even though they only had a vague idea who she was.) With Princess Diana it was grief, and with Ryan/Adam Lanza it's righteous anger. People are just enjoying the hell out of it.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Sure, it's something to get whipped up into a frenzy about. There's a reason we all know about pitchforks and yet few of us would know how to use them for their proper purpose. I think there are several things at play here, one is this kind of "entertainment" that you describe. The other is arm-chair psychology many of us engage in about what this shooter was like, even before there was any stable information out there. It's mostly just ignorance.
- lsdkhjfvgasn 14y ago
  Dramaturgy is pretty well explained in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" as the Pranksters' concept of everyone living in their own movie.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I'm sure there a myriad of things at work here but let's first consider YouTube comments. Go on YouTube, find just about video that has more than 10 or so comments. It will inevitably devolve into some hate filled tirade, usually racist or sexist in nature. I think basically what it boils down to is that there are a lot of really ignorant (any political site, especially right wing), and angry, hateful people out there that want to burn someone for anything. Now couple the fact that there are so many deranged people and then give them a place to blabber away, the Internet, and you have a recipe for constant demagoguery and witch-burning. It's kind of like "letters to the editor." It's mostly the idiots that are whipped up in enough frenzy to even care to write these kinds of letters; Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns are just another form of this phenomenon.

jerf 14y ago

A combination of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_%28sociology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_%28sociology%29 , probably.+ That actually took some work to Google up. I thought I'd be able to find something specifically about humans faking social signals in exactly this context, but I didn't. Also, "social signalling" is full of results about trying to teach computers how to deal with human social signals, and how to process data from social networks (not quite the same thing). It's a busier term that I thought it would be. (Dramaturgy is a word I'd never encountered before, either, though I've noticed the concept in play in people around me. Not mentioned in the Wikipedia page that I could see, but something you can probably see once you are looking, is that some people act as if they are in a play constantly, but are playing to the wrong audience. I have a relative who acts as if the entire world is a soppy mid-day women's talk show and constantly play up their concern to an audience who is actually pretty OK with, say, a 12-year old riding a bike without having to express concern every time that they are going to hurt themselves. And there's always some people who never seem to leave High School, or at least take a few decades longer than it should to realize that they're not on that stage anymore.)

dkarl 14y ago

I can't offer a psychological explanation, but my impression from the people I know who are the most eager to offer their opinion on the shooter is that they love it, that this is the coolest thing that happened to them this month. They'd be bored without it (or they'd be stirring up drama with their friends or co-workers.) They say they're angry, but they seem more excited and gleeful. Some people love tracking hurricanes, some people love elections, and some people love tragedies. It's a break from their boring lives, a dramatic and important occasion to share some excitement with millions of other people. Like when Princess Diana died -- suddenly a lot of people realized that she was really, really, really important to them. (Not that she wasn't important to a lot of people, but there were also plenty of people who were determined not to get left out of the excitement even though they only had a vague idea who she was.) With Princess Diana it was grief, and with Ryan/Adam Lanza it's righteous anger. People are just enjoying the hell out of it.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Sure, it's something to get whipped up into a frenzy about. There's a reason we all know about pitchforks and yet few of us would know how to use them for their proper purpose. I think there are several things at play here, one is this kind of "entertainment" that you describe. The other is arm-chair psychology many of us engage in about what this shooter was like, even before there was any stable information out there. It's mostly just ignorance.
lsdkhjfvgasn 14y ago
Dramaturgy is pretty well explained in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" as the Pranksters' concept of everyone living in their own movie.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

I'm sure there a myriad of things at work here but let's first consider YouTube comments. Go on YouTube, find just about video that has more than 10 or so comments. It will inevitably devolve into some hate filled tirade, usually racist or sexist in nature. I think basically what it boils down to is that there are a lot of really ignorant (any political site, especially right wing), and angry, hateful people out there that want to burn someone for anything. Now couple the fact that there are so many deranged people and then give them a place to blabber away, the Internet, and you have a recipe for constant demagoguery and witch-burning. It's kind of like "letters to the editor." It's mostly the idiots that are whipped up in enough frenzy to even care to write these kinds of letters; Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns are just another form of this phenomenon.