In the Crosshairs of a Media Firestorm

This piece is an excerpt from my ongoing larger project “On Our Collective Sense of Hopelessness: Media and Our View of Society in the 21st Century.”

The media’s reach is so wide now that it has blurred the lines between digital and real life. Many of us approach what we see on our screens as the objective, unequivocal documentation of the world and its events, because that’s what media was purposed to do — to show us what is going on, and provide perspectives on those matters. But we forget in our passionate and often heated consumption that digital algorithms, private corporate and moneyed interests, and a focus on entertainment value distort and augment our reality for the screen. Media platforms often and readily pump outdisastrous outcomes, misinformation, and controversial headlines with high clickbait value in the mostly economic effort to keep our eyes on their content. In this arena, many of us feel hopeless due to the problematic and troubling developments we constantly consume. We feel as if humanity has reached new lows in its quest to build and maintain society.

I do not think, however, that we have experienced some sudden degeneration of the human moral center, as many people have come to believe due to the constant calamity broadcasted to us through news and social media — the opposite really. We have over time become more tolerable of unique ways of life, created more room in society for different perspectives, and made unprecedented advances. Especially here in America, we do not suffer the wretched horrors experienced by many of our ancestors in days past.

We have all been caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual media firestorm, and in the milieu, we have each been badly wounded with the view that everyone and everything is doomed.

But in this new age, mass communication and digital media funnel the issues of our world into each of our individual lives by the second, every day. 24/7.

All year long.

At no other time in human history has each of us been forced to carry this emotional and mental burden, or had to adjust to this constant level of traumatic visual stimuli, all from devices that can fit in our pockets and travel with us everywhere. The frantic and inciting ways in which our media covers real world stories has contributed to a collectivesense of hopelessness that we are more out of touch with our humanity than ever before. And we’re hooked — we can’t help but to engage with these things because they really get to us.

We have all been caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual media firestorm, and in the milieu, we have each been badly wounded with the view that everyone and everything is doomed.

In truth, I think we may honestly just be seeing the inevitable faults that come with living in a society in its modern iteration, but played out for and marketed to us now at unprecedented rates on our smartphones and television screens. It all simply just feels like too fucking much. Feels like. But is it really? Are we all as doomed as we think? Considering the resulting consequences here of mass panic and hysteria, what are the ethical bounds and limitations of media coverage as it starts to do more harm than good for society?

Sure, we must be reporting the truth, good or bad, at all times. But what happens when those with an influential voice in the media landscape distort that truth for clicks and larger, more anxious audiences?

What do we do, for example, when politicians use digital platforms like Twitter to spread misinformation and incite real world violence against others?

The President of the United States, perhaps.

It is time for us to fully appreciate the troubling impact that media—traditional, digital, new and social—has had on humanity’s ability to conceive of and engage with the problems of our modern world in real time and space. Discourse has found a new home in the comment section. Bigots hide behind their keyboards and spread hate at digital speed. Legislation is fought in gridlock through tweets. Disaster craves a place on the screen.

We have to separate our relationship with digital from the ones we have with others and
our reality in order to be untethered from this stress inducing dynamic. Doing so, we might then be able to take the stories and ideas we are broadcasted and the purposeful frequency with which they are displayed at face value, and allow those
things to inform, rather than completely shape our conceptions of our world. Perhaps with that frame of reference, each of us might not feel so hopeless, and could instead make more productive contributions to the bettering and upkeep of our society. This increased awareness of how the media firestorm has impacted us might lead to a more objective and rational societal discourse. And with this we could get out into the real world with more level heads, ask people about their experiences instead of making prejudiced assumptions from our media viewership, and engage with societal systems and institutions on our own terms. The thought would be a moving reclamation of our reality from the digital space that now so closely defines who we think we have become.