Whence ridiculousness?

I have a theory about the variety and amplitude of outrageous behavior we see in our media these days and the general perception that everything is much more bizarre than it used to be. I think it’s misleading.

See, if you watch or read enough news, you’ll encounter what seems to be an unending parade of ever-sillier events and statements. “Aren’t people becoming stupider?” It’s a fair question, but it’s asking about the average, whereas news always has and always will focus on the unique or rare. Perhaps there are other reasons why things seem so especially strange these days.

First, media generally has shifted from feeling an obligation to lead and educate to pandering to whatever will make ratings. Alone, this alone wouldn’t mean much, but how the shift interacts with the other factors makes a big difference.

Second, the advent of fame as a desirable and all-too-easily attainable commodity means that many people relish becoming instantly finding it any way possible. People used to avoid bad behavior because it was costly. But now bad behavior pays, and it pays in one of the most coveted modern currencies.

Third, modern technology makes any story anywhere available to anyone almost immediately, and visually to boot. Whereas in the past, some loopy behavior in Tuscaloosa might have made the local paper and nothing else, it now gets captured on some passerby’s cell phone and airs ten minutes later on Fox News in Sacramento. Thus, average media bizarreness is raised by the fact that a story can come from anywhere, vastly expanding the pool of circus applicants.

Fourth, there are simply more of us. And more people by definition means more dancers at the fringe of the behavioral bell curve. So, on any given day, you are fed stories by people trying to grab your attention with the most bizarre thing they can find anywhere in the country from a much larger population composed of more eager-or-at-least-wiling-to-be-famous dolts.

Yes, it’s true that we may, in fact, be stupider on average. But it’s also possible that we are just the unwitting victims of science and math.