Spooky in ways that are at once real and imagined, novel and banal

March 18, 2025 1:41 AM

This reaches into other outlets that serve the terror-consumption cycle. In the pre-internet landscape all pain (while no less felt) was local. With the internet, what gives all forms of destruction their double-edged blade is their everpresence, their relatability, and their inescapability. The things that go on in someone’s backyard are no longer confined to their backyard. People don’t have to be caught in an immigration raid to be spooked by it. Listeners needn’t be in earshot of a firearm to hear it crack. from A United State of Fear [The Ringer] [CW: grisly details]
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

I can attest from personal experience that fear was absolutely broadcast through mass media before the Internet. I was born in the early 70s, and the kidnapping of Adam Walsh absolutely changed the way that my parents thought about my brother and I freeranging. My mom still talks about it being a turning point for her thinking about parenting decades later.

Based on his photo, the author looks very young – there seems to be a general lack of appreciation from post Internet people of the extremely powerful effects of network TV, newspapers, and before that, radio.
posted by reedbird_hill at 4:06 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

the extremely powerful effects of network TV, newspapers, and before that, radio.

Or indeed, of network TV, radio, and before that, newspapers.
posted by rory at 4:10 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

Yeah, the more I think about the "all pain was local" claim, the more annoying it is. It smacks of kids asking their parents if there were cars and TVs when they themselves were kids. "I, the author, cannot personally remember the twentieth century, so assume that it must all have been villages and town criers."

Mass hysteria has a long history.
posted by rory at 4:24 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Too true as regards legacy mass media. And yet, I have to say that there does feel like a difference today.

I'm not sure we're going to find a comprehensive consideration of the dynamics of social versus traditional media in The Ringer, but I gotta give it up that they're at least wrestling with our poisoned times.

When the sports pages are writing about Thomas Hobbes, you know something's a little weird.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:25 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Related, Secret Weird Things People Do as discussed on the Reconciliable Differences podcast https://overcast.fm/+AAE5IPbxTkI/17:43

Makes the point that empathy can also be exported en masse.
posted by squink at 4:32 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

I have to say that there does feel like a difference today.

The main difference, it seems to me, is that you can be fearful within moments of a scary event, rather than having to wait until you switch on the news in the evening or read about it in the newspaper the next morning. Online life is faster. That, and it fills up the gaps where we used to have breaks from reading or hearing about bad news, like waiting at a bus stop, meaning we can fit a greater volume of scary news into our day.

Pre-internet, though, it was entirely possible to fill up those gaps by worrying about the bad news you'd read in the paper that morning, if you were so inclined. The fear that my generation (X) felt about nuclear brinkmanship, for example, wasn't local—in my case it was the opposite of local, because I grew up a long way from any nuclear bombs or even likely targets. We used to manufacture our own anxiety, not wait for the internet to provide it! Kids today, I don't know.
posted by rory at 4:39 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

The main difference, it seems to me, is that you can be fearful within moments of a scary event, rather than having to wait until you switch on the news in the evening or read about it in the newspaper the next morning. Online life is faster. That, and it fills up the gaps where we used to have breaks from reading or hearing about bad news, like waiting at a bus stop, meaning we can fit a greater volume of scary news into our day.

Oh, 100%. We all carry around on our person a little computer on which we scroll bad news endlessly, type our reactions to bad news endlessly, and depending on whether you watch news on TV at home, consume even more bad news endlessly.

There has always been mass media consumption, but this is next level. You can rarely escape it because even if you are not endlessly scrolling and reading bad news, odds are high there is someone in the room with you who is and will fill you in on the bad news happening.

As a result we're all walking around with our cortisol sky high. People get mad if you disengage with the bad news because they assume you don't care, never mind we're all hurtling towards early graves with the amount of stress placed on us by, well, everything.
posted by Kitteh at 4:59 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

The conflict in Northern Ireland meant that terrorist attacks were reported what felt like constantly through my childhood in the UK. I don't feel more threatened today, probably a lot less really. Obviously the remaining violence from that conflict is much more localised now and much less reported within the UK outside Northern Ireland. The threat from Islamist terrorism seems much less frequent and generally less impactful (which is to say, less impactful, and less likely to impact, on me).

I guess what I'm saying is, if Americans are feeling more threatened is it because there are more attacks on Americans than there used to be? The internet might amp up the effect, but don't you have to consider frequency also?
posted by biffa at 5:04 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

The reason we say "no news is good news" is because important news tends to skew negative. I don't know why this is, but I accept it to be a truism. Maybe it has something to do with change. No matter the case, it seems like "the news" tends to make people feel worse on average. That's what the news is, and always has been.

The omnipresence of the internet has pushed "the news" into a new and unprecedented central place in our lives. In spite of whatever baselines are changing underneath us, I think it's reasonable to say the internet is broadly making the negative effects of "the news" even worse.
posted by grog at 5:11 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

if Americans are feeling more threatened is it because there are more attacks on Americans than there used to be?

There's an entire right-wing media ecosystem driving us towards feeling threatened. It seems like it started in broadcast media with the Murdoch family's Fox News, and now has spread into every kind of media. It used to be avoidable, but now it's in our government, which used to be about governance, but is now apparently national scale non-consensual bdsm.
posted by otherchaz at 5:31 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

The news used to be a mix of local, regional, national, and global. Now, the near-extinction of local news and an over-emphasis on gloom and doom by a handful of (mostly) conservative outlets means people know more about bad things happening somewhere else than anything, good or bad, happening in their own backyard. It's not good for any of us.
posted by tommasz at 6:34 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

I think that framing things in terms of "it didn't used to be like this!!!" is useless, because then it just turns into a misery-measuring contest about what was worse when. Ultimately, it's irrelevant to contemplate whether things were better or worse before the internet -- or, more to the point, before we carried the internet around in our pocket -- because we don't live in that world anymore. The question is do we like the world we live in now, and if not, what would realistic meaningful change look like.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:30 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]