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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I have to also wonder if it is due to people not understanding how things work.
When I moved from my rural area to a large local city, my small town father was quite concerned everything he saw on the evening news was happening in my neighborhood nightly too.
Every fire, gang shooting, stabbing, car theft, etc on the news that night was next door to me. He was pretty concerned in the beginning. He grew up in a pretty remote place which was small.
He passed over 10 years ago now and this was before social media really started to become our main sources of our curated news, not that he had a cellphone or a computer so I think for people like him social media would be even more effective at ramping up that fear of everything beyond the nonsense of the supermarket tabloids that had general threats and BS.
Now today's social media and news entertainment can really zoom in on creating specific fears for each person or highlight BS that isn't even a part of their normal lives to worry about.
My father had fairly outdated ideas like everything he saw in the press must be true because they wouldn't be allowed to print it otherwise. That included the tabloids. I can only imagine those that digest social media click bait fall into this trap pretty far...
We outsourced the vetting of our news to "trusted" sources with journalistjc integrity. We adopted this idea that we'd let select news organization do the research and explain situations to us--with context and nuance. Their ethics and impartiality was a foundational tenant and we could trust that what they were telling us was generally well researched, fact checked, and had multiple sources and was generally nuanced.
But that shifted in the late 90's and early 00s with the rise of 24hr "news" networks and the Internet...and an economic model where views and clicks generate revenue. Those old sources of information faced extinction and were forced to adopt more and more FUD approaches and catchy or outrage inducing headlines and articles to compete and get the views and clicks they needed.
I think we as a population and realistically our parents/grandparents have been slow to realize we can't outsource our information feed. We have to take ownership of that and realize we can't trust quite a bit of what we read online and even from formerly "trustworthy" news organizations.
I think the younger generations are already more skeptical and I hope that persists. We need more critical thinking and skepticism --but not so much that it turns into apathy and cynicism.
Part of it could just be parenting instincts. My wife is from a country where you can get heat stroke all year long. The first year, after our first child's was born, my mother-in-law would call after every snow fall.
Are you alright? Is the baby alright? How do you keep your house warm? Oh God what if you have to go into the car, there is no heat, and the baby dies!?
Took reassurance and time. She really is a sweet woman.