The Worse and Worst

How horrible are people?
How much more horrible are we now than we were before?
How much of a reinforcing factor is the media in reporting horribleness?
Does this reinforcement work more strongly for negative stories than positive ones?
Is the media responsible for horribleness, if even slightly?

My kneejerk answers to these questions would be: pretty horrible, noticeably so, a lot, yes, and yes.
I'm not going to link it because the contextual facts of the story are irrelevant, but what got me thinking about this is that I stumbled onto a story about a 35 year old woman who had given up her child for adoption about fifteen years ago. It seems she tracked down this biological son via the internet, befriended/manipulated him, and actually had sex with him.
This story is so absurdly horrible that I at first have a hard time believing that a human being is possible of that kind of depravity all on his/her own, that some vile stew of contemporary evils must have swirled around in this woman's conscious and unconscious beings to create the possibility for her actions.(1)
My next thought was about the old cliche how the major news outlets only report on negative stories and not positive ones. I also thought about how the still-adolescent internet media seems to cycle through stories in an exponential desire to find the most extraordinary or most amazing or most horrible one, as though the hyper-competitive nature of internet news forces that media to deliver greater and greater shock value to slice off whatever attention it can from its overstimulated audience. And how could this constant yearning for extremes, coupled with the clear and longstanding negative focus of these news stories, not lead a consuming humanity into at least unconsciously worse and worse behavior.
It's like the psychology behind copy-cat crimes, only with a baser, least-common-denominator competitive streak.
I think this effect does exist. I think this is a form of radical social evolution that is sped along by the brute power and speed of worldwide web connectedness.
I think as a general rule that the media is definitely complicit in this, but on a macro level and not a micro one. I don't specifically dislike media outlets or forms or any people associated with or responsible for them, but I do with some consistency dislike the observable effects of "media." In a way, you could say that not everyone is prepared to be exposed to infinite information.(2) You could definitely say that not everyone producing media is prepared for the responsibility of infinite information.
It's nice to know things. It's nicer to know that you can know something if only you decide to. But the near-infinite experiences of the world population are too much for any one person, especially when being handily distilled by media into only the wildest and most unbelievable.
I guess in a secondary and indirect way I'm saying to you not to leave out the banality of the world. Indeed, if media only to focus more on the amazingly positive stories that abound in the world, then that would only partly remedy the situation.
Nonetheless, as a consequence of this strain of thought, here in this blog I'm going to try to consciously make note of the wonderful things that I see, both inherent in the world and of course those which come from people.


1. Big time disclaimer here. I'm in no way excusing this woman from blame here. I'm also not saying she did what she did as part of some natural escalation of society. Every crime is unique because every criminal is unique. What I'm saying is that the maybe 0.01% of crazy that got into this woman thanks to her absorption of other negative media stories might be enough to push her ever slightly to ever-worse acts. And if lots and lots of people are absorbing the same tiny sliver of acceptance of depravity, then eventually dominoes will start to fall. It's like the parable if you put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and give them a million years, eventually one would produce Hamlet. But if they were all watching a continuous loop of Shakespearean tragedies while sitting in front of the typewriters, you can be very sure that it would take a lot less longer.
2. Naturally, no one could ever be prepared for infinite information, though the thought, as mere theory to consider, is an interesting one.