When So Many Do Jump off a Bridge

Remember the Old Saw "Would You Jump off a Bridge If Others Did?" Many Would, Especially When Covered by Modern Media

Many simply prefer to turn a blind eye to the seductive, hypnotic power of mass media and now, more recently, social media¹. While such persons are no doubt some mix of naïve, stupid, and incredibly foolish, no one quite knows how much of any one of these terrible attributes pertains to any one person entertaining such folly.  Even so, the tendency to underestimate or diminish the effect of modern media on what is perceived as individual choice is pervasive, partly deriving from naïveté and partly from a vested interest in those powers wielding such implements of modern media to downplay how incredibly powerful such instruments are. This incredible power on the masses is of utmost relevance to so many of our troubles.  Among other things, it informs a great deal about those advocates of transgender ideology who blithely deny that the rise in persons identifying as “transgender” could ever be a social contagion, as Abigail Shrier, Dr. Dianna Kenny, and others rightly that it is a social contagion. The enduring sentimentality associated with rugged individualism in the American tradition give unwarranted credence to these denials.

The left cannot meme. This effort to discredit social contagion theory and its role in the transgender menace could not be less persuasive.

The issues involved go well beyond the simple herd mentality that characterizes human nature. Rather, the effect of mass media and perhaps to a greater extent social media has an incredibly powerful—and most often destructive—ability to invoke, manipulate, and exacerbate this herd mentality. These propensities are so powerful they can even impact the decision whether or not to commit suicide. In other words, social contagion goes well beyond other maladies from transgenderism to bulimia, it can even override the most deep-seated survival instincts that make suicide ideation let alone carrying out thoughts of suicide to completion incredibly difficult.

Very simply put, media coverage is directly correlated with higher rates of suicide. After Marylin Monroe committed suicide, suicides jumped twelve percent.  This and other considerations have led to industry standards that seek to minimize the risk of increased suicide resulting from suicide coverage in the news and other media. These standards have been promulgated by government agencies like the Center for Disease Control and mass media institutions themselves.  This policy includes:

·         placing an emphasis on how the suicide harms relatives and the greater community;

·         always placing suicide helplines and other resources conspicuously in the coverage, whether print or multi-media;

·         deliberately refraining from romanticizing or otherwise condoning or explaining the suicide;

·         refrain from repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.

One study even indicates that suicide rates can go up or down depending on a confluence not just of societal norms and mores, but rather how these stories are covered by mass media in the context of any given society’s different social norms and mores:

national suicide rates were higher in countries where media attitudes toward suicide were more accepting (Hungary) and suicide completers were more positively portrayed (Japan) (Fekete et al., 2001). Conversely, national suicide rates were lower in countries (Finland, Germany, and the United States) where reporting tended to portray the suicide victim and act of suicide in terms of psychopathology and abnormality, and to describe the negative consequences of the suicide.

Other countries go far beyond the CDC recommendations, either through the promulgation of more industry set standards or laws.

This is not to suggest that mass and social media are the only elements that can ignite a suicide contagion, though they have a unique propensity to accelerate that and any other contagion. Such a deadly contagion can also rub off from one person to another in a given community, as it does with transgenderism, anorexia, and other contagions. Kenny sets forth the phenomenon of the suicide cluster:

A well-documented example of a suicide “echo” cluster (an identical suicide cluster occurring within 10 years of a first cluster) occurred in two high schools in Palo Alto that, between them, had suicide rates four to five times higher than the national average.  In 2009, three students committed suicide in a nine-month period by stepping in front of a commuter train. A fourth student committed suicide by hanging. In 2013 a mental health survey showed that 12 percent of students from these schools had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months. Thereafter, there was another spate of suicides, with three students taking their lives within three weeks of each other. A fourth committed suicide four months later by jumping off a tall building and a fifth followed shortly afterwards by walking in front of a train. Extreme perfectionism and pressure to excel at school, get into Stanford, make a lot of money, and be ostentatiously successful materially and intellectually were assessed to be far too great a burden for the more vulnerable students to withstand. 

One interesting digression: it seems one of the plot points of the cult classic Heathers was drawing on a real-life phenomenon.  Although none of the deaths were actual suicides, the murders instigated by J.D. and unwittingly by Veronica were perceived as suicides, which led directly to a spike in suicide ideation among their peers, with both Heather McNamara and Martha “Dump Truck” Dunnstock making attempts, although each attempt seemed more like a cry for help or want for attention.   

In addition to the role modern media can have in instigating and worsening suicide social contagion, there are other instances demonstrating that the masters of modern media as well as governments around the world are aware of the immense power they wield over the masses. Persuasively arguing that the transgender menace is a social contagion that warrants similar measures regarding other such contagions, Dr. Dianna Kenny articulates how the banning of advertising for smoking and other public health measures greatly reduced smoking in Australia, which is why she wants similar measures directed squarely on the transgender menace.  The efficacy of bans on advertising of cigarettes and smoking tobacco have generally been effective in different countries throughout the modern world.

The powerful role the media has in either encouraging or discouraging (or simply refraining from encouraging) undesirable or destructive behavior is observed in a variety of contexts.  In various professional sports, there is a phenomenon in which rogue fans run onto the field during the game.  With the exception of college students running en masse as a group after the end of a college football game, television networks (and even radio broadcasts) conspicuously omit coverage of these incidents.  In a baseball or football broadcast, the production team will move the cameras away to a different part of the field, or pull up an infographic as the announcers then discuss whatever statistics or facts are related in that infographic until such time as the runner has been apprehended and the game is ready to commence as before.

They do this because both these media interests and the professional and collegiate sports leagues they collaborate with have a vested interest in not encouraging this behavior—a vested interest in not creating a social contagion of rogue fans running onto the field, presenting a danger to themselves and the players.  The media also have a vested interested in not encouraging any such interference in the lucrative enterprise of professional sports totaling many hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.  Admittedly, this effort on part of the mass media and the various sports leagues is somewhat dampened by social media, where these instances are often the subject of viral videos. This notwithstanding, media outlets and the various sports leagues manage what they can control and generally refrain from covering these instances precisely because they do not want to encourage such behavior.

Several further inferences of incredible importance are to be made from all of this. First among them, coverage of undesirable behavior in mass media and to an even greater extent social media is made with actual knowledge that the way media choose to cover any particular topic, behavior, or trend can and indeed does give rise to a social contagion of that behavior.  Mass media and to an even greater extent social media have a profound, deep influence if not control over human behavior that too many are simply underestimating to a most dangerous degree. This intent and specific knowledge can be imputed to a whole host of evils propagated by media and advertising, to the ubiquity of mixed-race couples and other portrayals of miscegenation in movies, television, and advertising, to coverage depicting—or, more accurately, promoting—hyper promiscuity, to the transgender craze running rampant in zoomers particularly but even older generations as well. Beyond that, that modern media can drive so many to such irrational and even self-destructive decisions (nothing could be more self-destructive than suicide) further discredits many of the assumptions that the so-called “Market Place of Ideas” is founded on .  A critical mass of people do not consider conflicting, competing viewpoints and deliberate over these viewpoints on the merits in any rational way.

This of course is very much interwoven and bound up with the key concept of Defining Deviancy Down, a topic written about extensively on this publication. In the briefest of terms, this concept explains how society, any society, becomes unable to regard undesirable behavior as deviant if that behavior is not properly sanctioned and stigmatized, as that behavior gradually becomes mainstream. Once that formerly deviant behavior becomes mainstream, other more outrageous behavior that was regarded as more deviant or even unthinkable becomes less deviant and takes the places of marginally deviant behavior on the cusp of behavior in that society. This fundamental concept informs why media encouraging or normalizing deviant or destructive behavior is so deleterious to society, as it also demonstrates how painfully stupid the blithe assertion to just “turn it off” or “change the channel” really is.

Readers will remember this segment discussed explicitly in “What Other Consenting Adults Do Is Our Concern.” Consider that vermin such as that transgender advocate do not want sensible people to care because it does affect and shape society—in the ways they want.

These and other considerations of course further impugn and discredit the utterly preposterous “why do you care” objection so often touted by those hellbent on dismantling social standards of any kind, from the most recent wave of feminist activism that wants to stigmatize “slut-shaming” to transgenders and their advocates who regularly trout out that line to anyone who objects to the many ways in which they harm society and adversely impact our daily lives in so many profound ways.  What others do DOES AFFECT both other individuals and society at large, not just by defining deviancy up or down, but because what others do rubs off on other people in the most irrational and self-destructive ways imaginable, as postulated by the social contagion theory, properly stated as social contagion fact.  These affects are magnified exponentially by the immense power of mass media and social media.  Remember these very phenomena the next someone dares ask “How does this affect you, personally?” or “Why do you care?”

1. There does not yet seem to be a term universally understood to encompass both mass media and social media. Both phenomena will be referred to as “modern media.”