Danah Boyd's The World Is Not Falling Apart

With technology being more accessible to people, we have the capability of receiving constant updates on the latest stories, specifically news reports. The news offers us information on health reports, the government, and crime. Typically the news is our main source of information, especially for affairs in and out of the country, and so we use the content displayed in the news in order to determine the state of the world. With the news generally reporting devastating and horrifying stories, we assume that the world is in a state of mayhem and distress. Andrew Mack, a director of Home Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University, and Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote the article “The World Is Not Falling Apart”, published on Slate Magazine’s website, in order to present that although people believe that the world is more dangerous than it has ever been before, in reality the world is not. They explain to the reader that with easy access to media, it is easier to focus only on the information being presented, which are the bad stories. They discuss that news media exaggerates news stories in order to get a …show more content…
She utilizes a metaphor “the attention economy” to describe the economic profit and the payment of the attention from viewers. In Danah Boyd’s article “Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us”, she claims that we “live in a culture of fear” and that “social media is magnifying the attention economy” (Boyd). Boyd in both her article and her public talk “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics” focuses on three types of fear: fear of the unknown, fear for the young, and fear of the young. We can use the knowledge of Boyd’s claims to explain how a mass murderer can receive such