Fear and attention

Boingboing referenced this talk today: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2012/SXSW2012.html

It's called "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics" and talks about how our innate tendency to pay attention to information that causes an emotional reaction affects how we engage with media scare stories, statistics on crime, and other such things.

This resonated a bit because I was thinking about how much time many people spend immersed in a non-stop series of scare stories. The other morning at the gym, for instance, a guy put on the news. What followed was half an hour of accounts of crimes committed in various cities, many with repeated imagery of smashed cars, ambulances, people on stretchers, etc.

These things happened, of course. But so did thousands of other things. And at this moment, in the gym, none of them were happening. Nor were they relevant to the immediate future (ie none of the criminals were currently on the loose in our neighborhood, about to break into the gym and shoot anyone).

A previous day I had come into the gym and someone had the TV on and this time it was Discovery Channel - a series of segments featuring animals that were in danger. A bear trapped in a sewage tank, a police dog injured by a criminal, a baby seal desperately trying to escape a shark.

It seems the sole purpose of this information is really emotional pornography - it is not useful information relevant to ones immediate circumstances, but rather serves solely to flood the body with adrenaline. Depending on the source this flood of vigilant attention is then directed towards buying stuff or voting for someone or just watching more and more of the same shit.

I don't watch TV at home, except for specific downloaded shows I like, so the only places I see it are in public areas where it's running as background entertainment. I have asked a couple people on occasion - when they were ranting about the horrible news they had just watched - why they didn't just stop watching it. Some said they wanted to "be informed," others said they "liked to laugh about it" or "liked to know what everyone else was watching."

Thoughts?

This relates to practice in that that ability to be manipulated gets broken quite a bit as one sees how the reactions arise, no? I used to get really worked up by icky news and stew in outrage quite a bit. It's very exhausting, but it was weirdly unavoidable.

It seems the sole purpose of this information is really emotional pornography

-ona

Yup, that's it. Stimulation.

A quote I read/heard? recently has been in my mind a lot: ~excitement isn't happiness, but most people can't see the difference.

oh brilliant quote. brilliant.

It's true that it is involuntary. But I have had conversations with people about it where this idea of it being a strange kind of titillation was relevant to discussing it. Then again, such conversations seem to take place when the person is at a point where they recognize the attachment to that drama and it is in the process of letting itself go (because letting go is also not voluntary, in my experience). In that recognition of the letting go, one person, for example, said "I can't believe how much time I've spent thinking about this subject. It doesn't change it. It doesn't fix it. It doesn't resolve anything. It's just like a sort of strange addiction to the adrenaline of the drama. I can believe that this problem is a terrible shame and a horrible thing, but I don't have to stew in the outrage six hours a day in order to believe that."

But, yes, I agree, this is really something involuntary, and not something to be ashamed of or try to repress. Seeing through it comes naturally from practice, it seems.

"letting go is also not voluntary, in my experience" - ona

This was a revelation for me! Just another piece of evidence to convince me that I shan't "try" to do anything beyond the bare minimum of practice instructions. Let the practice naturally carry me.