Work Text:
— Word Count: 962
Prompt Category: Social Sciences
— How does constant exposure to global events influence which issues people pay attention to?
Global events, or “big events” (Kushnir et al., 2024), are social, economic, and/or ecological events that disrupt and affect people on an international level. Crises—negative “big events”—are categorised as either regular (Rosenthal et al., 1989) or creeping crises (Boin et al., 2020, 2021). The first assumes that there is an inherently sociopolitical dilemma that threatens a society's values and systems and must be urgently addressed, giving it a definite beginning and end (e.g., wars, pandemics). Whereas the second, creeping crises, can be social, economic, ecological, or any combination of the three. It lacks a definite beginning and end (e.g., climate crises) and is assumed to be escalating, necessitating a long-term solution. Regular crises are those that the international community can easily detect and categorize as positive or negative—be it moral, social, etc.—followed by a systematic solution. The latter is where public reception and retention are negatively influenced by the constant exposure social media provides. It slows or even halts the identification process, blurs the path to a solution or even a clear statement, and affects society’s behaviour and perceived norms.
The online algorithm’s nature is an endless stream of information targeted at an individual —from headlines to thumbnails to scripts—that leads to crises such as wars, emergencies, natural calamities, and threats to public health, all condensed and consumed within a few seconds. This, paired with how public opinion mimics the judicial system, recognises the guilty and the innocent, yet easily shifts and sways due to the lack of any binding law, and its constant indulgence relies on emotional reaction. This reliance blurs the line between devastation and the normal. Wars, and their consequent effects, are the crises and events that gain traction and significance because of their tangibility and physicality—death counts, percentages of destroyed cities, refugees—it is nowhere near an abstract concept; therefore, the majority of the audience can understand it as negative. Yet numbers create distance and make it difficult to empathise with news reports and snippets; names are not recognised, and what haunts the audience more is the physical evidence in photos and videos. Once the event becomes more subtle, without the alarm of an announcement, a creeping crisis (a slow-building threat and devastating surprise), the public either relies on mass opinion or begins to perceive it as normal.
Central to this paper is a creeping crisis born from global hyper-connectivity: the overuse of social media has fragmented the media landscape, trapped users in echo chambers due to assumptions and distrust in mainstream content, and enabled troll farms to execute disinformation campaigns that only meme-ify these events. When these crises—regular and creeping—overlap with one another, they are no longer relevant due to being “overplayed” and fade from mainstream media through the coping of the masses with humor that strips off the gravity of these events and their victims. The myriad of available information has the tendency to overwhelm online users, who in turn cope by using the physical advantage of turning away from the screen altogether, and when repeated, eventually become desensitised. This creates an indifference in society on account of the redundancy in the algorithm's functions and an overexposed audience. Therefore, the perception of normal gradually changes due to social media’s overexposure.
This indifference is bisected by two interrelated behaviours: learned helplessness and the bystander effect. The first, learned helplessness (Seligman, 1972), posits repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events that leads to an internalised belief that the situation will not change even with presented opportunities (Nickerson, 2024). It is marked primarily by the voters who no longer participate in elections due to the understanding that no matter the candidate one chooses, the state of their government (and by extension the world) will remain the same. The same goes for the indifference to the climate crisis; initiatives to the three R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) only conclude in the same dumping grounds or the prevalence of the Epstein Files, where information is deliberately withheld by elites and higher positions, and instead seen as an inevitability rather than an outcome of a flawed system. The absurdity of global events, when compared to an individual, dampens any form of agency that one may act on. Ultimately, it is political and societal resignation and passivity due to a perceived lack of control. The second becomes the consequent reaction to the first, the bystander effect, is traditionally characterised as (1) the feeling of responsibility diffused by the presence of a larger crowd, (2) negative and public judgement for offering assistance, and (3) the justification for the absence of help as the situation not being urgent (Latané & Darley, 1970). It amplifies the change in perceiving normality online, with responses relying on whether or not the individuals are directly affected by it—using the measurement of emotion and reaction—and if not, then it is swept under the rug.
Given that crises are presented in numbers, words, and short-form content, the international community must confront how this medium erodes an audience’s capacity for empathy, reducing active civic participants to passive digital bystanders. In the absence of a unifying force, the true gravity of global devastation is undermined and quickly falls out of public relevance. Addressing these “big events,” therefore, requires deeper critical reflection when investigating their systemic causes and broader implications. Understanding how these crises interrelate and differ in severity is a vital initial step, forcing audiences to accept accountability and seek concrete action. Ultimately, dissecting these events yields essential insight into how institutional systems fail, how human vulnerabilities manifest, and how deeply media consumption alters the collective perception of normal. Discerning right from wrong should not be viewed as a badge of moral superiority; rather, it is the bare minimum forgotten by an idle society, implicit in these crises.
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