Terrorism and Contagious Media

There was a truly provocative blog post on the NYTimes' Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt. The blog entry solicited ideas on which terrorist attack would wreak the most havoc. Predictably, the article prompted both scathing rebukes and praise for its openness in roughly equal measure.

It got me to thinking about whether the scathing critiques had any merit. As I understand it, the worry of most of the naysayers was that either terrorists or unhinged people looking for ways to lash out at the world would get ideas from this blog and be more apt to try to carry those ideas out. It might be that they actually get a specific idea on how to cause the most fear, or it might be that just talking about terrorism in this manner puts it in the forefront of their minds and gets them to act out while not necessarily cribbing an actual idea from the website.

This is similar territory to that which I covered in my blog post-VA Tech. In both cases, we imagine an unhinged individual with nothing to live for who wants some sort of revenge on the rest of the world. He has this nebulous rage built up, but its unclear as to how it will be released. Maybe if he is presented with one set of stimuli (say, a lot of ultimate fighting videos and some death metal), he will train to become an ultimate fighter and beat the shit out of similarly frustrated young males. If he is presented with another set of stimuli (say, non-stop coverage of a mass murder or extensive, detailed speculation as to how to carry out a terrorist attack that would cause the most fear), then he might be more inclined to carry out such an act. A third set of stimuli might prompt him to merely kill himself, etc. With Virginia Tech, the worry seemed to be more emotional than logistic. The images of the gunman had a certain visceral power that offended people. In the case of today's NYTimes blog, its just words.

Many comments on the blog that fall into the pro-openness, pro-Levitt category take a "cat's out of the bag" approach to the potential harmfulness of information. This assumes that all nodes on the information network are equal. If a bit of information is on some obscure message board, then its liable to have the same effect on people's behavior as if it were on a higher-profile webpage. The linked nature of the internet means that if a bit of information is interesting, funny, or dangerous enough to warrant attention, it will get attention via digg, delicious, or the viral spread of blogs, vlogs, and emails.

Here's my problem with that reasoning as it applies here. What Levitt wrote isn't what might actually cause harm. He sketched out only one scenario. Its the aggregation of reader comments that could contain the terrorist scenarios that are superior to any that have been thought of before.

I've been waiting for the Wisdom of Crowds wiki-logic to hit the war on terror. By aggregating these scenarios, we seem to be doing the terrorists' work for them. It takes time, energy, and intellectual ability to think up plausible scenarios for terrorist attacks. One writer (e.g. Tom Clancy) could be pretty good at that, and a bunch of devoted terrorists could be just as good if not better, but a larger group of well-educated, creative people (if they worked collectively) would certainly be better at it than either Clancy or the terrorist. So I think you'd be mistaken to say that if we can come up with a bright idea for causing terror, it would've already been thought of. Even the most sophisticated think tank is probably no match for the collective wisdom of the NYTimes' readership (as I pat myself on the back).

Then there's this paradox: the people who think the information is harmful and comment accordingly are, in some sense, aiding and abetting the harmful information by making it more visible. In the inexorable logic of online community popularity, if a comment has many comments, it is more likely to be considered "important," to be forwarded, to be read. The virus spreads.

If indeed this discussion is followed by a large scale terrorist attack (or a few of them), we shouldn't assume that it caused it/them, nor should we fall back on the well worn truth that terrorism is extremely uncommon and therefore is nothing to worry about. Personally, I have never been hit by a car even once in my life. Does this mean that I shouldn't look both ways before crossing a street? We have lived in a world where Tom Clancy and other writers have dreamed up scenarios for terrorism, and one where groups of terrorists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking up ways to disrupt societies, but I don't think we've ever had an instance of a large number of creative, intelligent people brainstorming about ways to cause mass fear. In the sense that this is unprecedented, I think its impossible to definitively say whether or not this kind of openness is necessarily good.

But it could be good. The quicker we can think of potential problems, the quicker we can plan solutions. Dubner and Levitt have always been convinced that people are worried about the wrong things (handguns instead of swimming pools, for instance). There are those who believe that the threat of terrorism is way overblown and think that Levitt's exercise proves that by showing the disparity between possible scenarios (lots) and actual events (very, very few), we prove this. But I would say that we might learn what kinds of terrorism would be worth prepping for by discussing in this way. If we talk about it openly, we might discover that we should spend the money we're spending on airline safety on protecting the food and water supply or developing a well-known, well practiced quarantine protocol. Dubner and Levitt are all about correcting conventional wisdom when its out of whack, and this would seem to be an instance where they're needed.

You could also argue that by familiarizing us with possible doomsday scenarios, the article and the discussion makes eventual hysteria less likely. And really, that's what would cause a society to collapse: not the attack, but the ensuing hysteria. If we can convince potential attackers that we'll bounce right back from an attack (either b/c of our preparedness, our short attention span, or both), they'll be less likely to attack in the first place.

Hmm. Short attention spans...

So maybe its good that our attention spans have been whittled away by advertisements. This way, we can't stay scared for very long.