Is this a Big Deal? Hysteria, Social Media, and the News

I am watching, listening, and reading (and now writing) about a news story as it unfolds: a gunman has shot himself in the undergrad library of UTexas. The story is especially salient to me because I'm going there for a conference tomorrow, I spent two years there as a Master's student, and I know a fair amount of people who live there, some of which attend the university.

This event (which may be in the past or may still be occurring, depending on whether reports of a second gunman who has yet to be apprehended are true) came to my attention through reddit. I woke up, fixed breakfast, watched a little Sportscenter on ESPN, and then opened my computer to go online. Although I have my browser homepage set to the NYTimes, I rarely start a day by opening a browser but instead click on a bookmarked page from my already-open browser, usually checking my email or going to reddit first out of habit and out of a desire for self-relevant information (email) and appealing, brief distractions (reddit). So if, say, some event of great consequence were to happen, it is likely that I would find out about it this way. But if it were truly of GREAT consequence (e.g. 9/11), I would've found out about it either on NPR (which I flipped on when I was barely awake, as is my habit) or ESPN.

So there was the headline on reddit: Shooter at University of Texas library RIGHT NOW. Rather than click on the link or the comments, I went to NYTimes to corroborate it. Oddly, the story didn't appear to be there. I thought that the shooter maybe didn't kill anyone, or that it was a hoax. But then, buried in smaller headlines on the page, I saw mention of it. I read that story and it said that the gunman fired shots and killed himself, but no mention of anyone else being hurt. I then turned on CNN and, oddly, they weren't talking about it. Neither was Fox News. Other news stations were playing commercials.

I didn't have all the details of this story, but the fact that it wasn't plastered all over the front page of the Times and that CNN wasn't covering it at that moment led me to this conclusion: it is not a big deal. Because of the lack of coverage, it is extremely unlikely that anyone I know was hurt in anyway as a result of this event. It would be safe for me to assume that everything was fine with them, everything was fine with me going there tomorrow, and that everything would, in general, be fine.

This is not the picture that I got when I went to Facebook and twitter. Many people in my online social network have connections to UT, and so many of them posted links to news stories about the shooting, just within the last hour, with very little supplementary information other than brief declarations of fear or concern. With twitter, I had to search for Austin, UT, but the result is the same: brief expressions of fear, rumors of a second shooter still on the loose. From this information, it seemed like a big deal, a huge deal. Reading my Facebook feed, I was...well, not necessarily gripped with fear or concern, but I got the impression that I needed to keep monitoring the situation out of concern for people I knew and to see if I would still be traveling to Austin tomorrow. If I watched mainstream media, I wouldn't get that feeling. I would get the feeling that I could relax and go back to work.

There's this narrative that mainstream media is too big, too ad-supported, to get at the truth. The truth percolates up from the blogosphere, from citizen journalists. If this story isn't covered by CNN or NYTimes right away, its because they're slow moving dinosaurs who just got scooped, and they don't know what's really important but instead promote the values of their sponsors. But here, in terms of "level of appropriate concern," I think that the mainstream media has it right. If I step back and look at the situation, at least what I know of the situation (seems like an isolated, botched shooting, not a coordinated, successful attack by several people), the appropriate reaction is: don't panic, its okay, no one is in more danger than they were a day ago. I just don't get this from the little social network newsfeed that's evolved over the past few years. There have been legitimate criticisms of coverage of disasters like 9/11 and Katrina saying that certain frames used in the coverage gave viewers the impression that there was more panicking and more reason for panicking than there really were. I've had this feeling before about bias in the news, but I think it applies here, too: you thought this was a problem when mainstream interests were handling reporting the news? Just wait until 'the people' start doing the reporting.

I think that in some cases, crowdsourcing news helps information get out faster and that the crowd can, counter to our intuition, promote the accurate, relevant information over the inaccurate information in an efficient manner, more efficiently than MSM. But the emotion that seeps into our facebook feeds, the undiluted fear that cannot help but contaminate our accounts of our experiences and is being mistaken for "news", doesn't move us any closer to gaining an accurate impression of what the true risk is to our selves and people we know and love when a bad thing happens. Its self-relevant and is provided by many different people, and thus appeals to us as "truth," but its laden with emotions that aren't present in detached MSM accounts of events. One may say that those emotions are part of the truth of an event. That sounds good, but I think that emotional reporting of an event as it is happening is likely to be associated with overestimates of how threatening the event is to our selves and others (I'll avoid using the loaded term "hysteria").

One thing that really stuck with me about the coverage of 9/11 was the strangely detached monotone of many of the anchors as we all watched the World Trade Centers collapse. Certainly not the way twitter would've handled it. I feel like this change has happened in the past couple of years and that it is significant: many people no longer turn on the TV when disaster strikes. They go online. Online promises more viewpoints, more immediate updates, deeper and broader accounts of everything. Which is better? Which is truer? Which leads to worry and which leads to action?

The hidden choice of establishing your media environment or repertoire

When we think about any choice we make – whether to eat that apple, move to Omaha, or avoid writing your dissertation and check the headlines instead – we typically think about it in two ways: in-the-moment decisions or general tendencies. But there’s an in-between step that’s missing from this picture, a decision or a series of decisions that preceded the one we’re examining: the decision to shape our media information environment. If characteristics of our environment affect the comparisons we make and the decisions we make (e.g. how many options are there, how easily accessible are they, what are their characteristics), then we must ask how we ended up in the choice environments in which we find ourselves. Increasingly, I think we’re partially responsible for them, though we tend to forget this quickly.

When we decide to text someone or check our email or go on Facebook or do some work, that decision is shaped by earlier decisions: the decision to have the internet in our house, the decision to keep our cell phone by our side. These decisions feel obvious because they bundle so many different kinds of options together. You cannot give up the distraction of Facebook because it comes bundled with access to the internet which you need in case a work-related email demands that you respond promptly or you will lose professional standing. Technologies that allow a user to block certain websites or applications from their own future access seem initially absurd, but really, they represent an act of un-bundling. Sometimes you want access to social media; other times, it is not in your best interest. Such prioritizing and self-restriction will become necessarily in a distraction-saturated media environment.

Today’s media environments are often characterized by the extent to which they are saturated by distractions: the vibrating cell phone, the regularly updated blogs waiting to be scanned, the pinging email inbox. We might consider the extent to which they are saturated by temptations, and how we might make a distinction between these two terms. All temptations surely are distracting, but are all distractions tempting? The term “distraction” is used to refer to messages that expect our particular, unique attention at a specific time (e.g. email correspondence, text message) and it is used to refer to messages or characteristics of the environment that are generally directed to us (as members of a larger group or as individuals) but are always there, not needing our attention that that moment. Facebook, ESPN, and that chocolate chocolate-chip muffin just sit there, waiting for my self-control to ebb, at which point I will succumb to temptations and indulge in a distraction.

When I give in to the temptations – Facebook, ESPN, muffin – I feel responsible for the choice, as is indicated by my feeling of guilt upon indulgence. But when I check my work email, read and respond to a work email, I feel no sense of responsibility. This is simply a condition of our collective environment! So, when we say we live in an era of distraction, we fold these two kinds of distractions together: the temptations (i.e. vices) and the expectations of immediate attention related to ostensibly virtuous activities like work. We do this in part because of the way media is sold: in bundles of virtue and vice.

And yet I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook that easily when it comes to work-related email or other virtuous online distractions. We have some agency in designing our media choice environment. We could’ve decided to put our cell phone on silent or not checked our email for 8 hours. One might complain that to do this would be to give up social and professional standing, and I think that if you just one day decided to do it, without giving the people you are in contact with any warning, then you would certainly give up social and professional standing. But if you simply gave the people around you the expectation that you are unreachable sometimes (either explicitly by saying that you will be “at work” during certain hours or implicitly by purposely delaying your responses to them), you could reduce the number of “necessary distractions” in your life. We have the tools and the ability to unbundle our lives but we have to acknowledge the self that can alter the media choice environment, the repertoire from which our future selves select an activity. That self has more and more say over what we end up doing with our time.