It’s just a traveling carnival of trends
On Tuesday, the New York Times spent a lot of ink ( or bytes, depending on your location) on an outrage at the Pumpkin Festival in Keene, N. H., in October. Apparently, the festival got out of hand because of teenagers, who got drunk, made noise, threw bottles and ripped up street signs.
They had been egged on by social media, the story said, which told the kids where to show up and promoted the misbehavior with colorful online videos.
But the article was a trend piece, so further instances of bad behavior were recounted. In Panama City, Fla., both a shooting and a rape were documented by cell phones. Both Madison, Wis., and Amherst, Mass., have cracked down on college partying.
Prominent professors worried. One pontificated about “celebratory rioting,” which she said was very different from social protest rioting, except in the sense that people riot. Another fretted that sharing these scenes on social media could “normalize alcohol use,” which, you know, I think that barn door has closed, horse gone.
And way deep in the story, yet another professor remarked: “We don’t see, statistically, an uptick in riskier behaviors.”
So what’s the story? Teenagers get rowdy? Surely that’s been happening for a while. Social media makes everything worse? No evidence of that. Appalling, criminal things happen when people drink too much? We’ve known that forever.
I can remember “spring break kids go wild” stories since, oh, 1965 or so. There are hormones, after all, including testosterone. Maybe it’s news because it’s a chance to confirm our prejudices and blame social media for what is, in fact, not a trend. Uncovering new areas of worry is always good for the media biz, even when the outrages are more or less eternal.
The media seem to get outraged a lot. That’s the only compelling thing about about the Pumpkin Festival story: the outrage it can generate. Misbehavior, teenagers, wildness, dancing, cars burning, rock peltings, we are doomed — that kind of stuff. In fact, if you want an overall trend, that’s it: manufactured outrage.
And the outrage darts from here to there, alighting for a week, two weeks, and then on to the next thing.
In Indiana, there was a great dustup over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It ended with a hastily added clause saying, “We didn’t mean this to be about gay people, really, just a coincidence.” Then the media, having been outraged long enough, moved on, perhaps to a Chipotle in Ohio.
Their exit came despite the fact that anti- LGBT discrimination is still legal in Indiana, or nearly so. There is no recognition of marriage, or of marriage rights derived from a union in a state where same- sex marriage is legal. Also lost in the shuffle was the fact that the law still allows discrimination against people who want contraceptive devices or abortions. That was just a subplot, and three minutes is not enough to deal with subplots.
Police violence has also been very big in the media, and a “national conversation” has been started about it, and new videos of black men being killed for no particular reason continue to surface. Eventually media consumers will get inured to all of it: The grainy, shaky videos; the cops pledging to do better; the grieving families calling for healing — it’s really the same story. When the novelty wears off, and the media outrage has run its course, the story will dissipate — and, I suspect, so will the national conversation. No doubt committees will make recommendations, which will get a few tiny stories in the better news outlets, and then silence. Because, wait, we have the Next Big Thing to be outraged about.
This is not to say that the police violence or Religious Freedom Restoration Act stories are unimportant. The spotlight on them is useful, and perhaps the result will be net gains for the victims and their families. But six months from now, the latest murdered black man is not going to get that much attention. Just like before.
This pattern concerns me a lot more than rock- throwing drunken youngsters.
The media are magpies. They peck at shiny objects until their luster is gone. It’s all short- attention- span theater. Somehow, though, people don’t notice how their journey through the world of outrage has been curated. And after every media stop, the real people who deal with real problems go back to work, always underfunded and anonymous once more.
Next up: People are sneaking across our borders! You won’t believe who and where!