Are Moral Panics Less Common Than They Used to Be?

Recently revisiting the moral panic over the release of Joker it struck me that such panics seem less common than they used to be--for example, in comparison with the 1990s.

Where explanation of the matter is concerned my guess would be that this is because of the fragmentation and polarization of the public--or at least, that fragmentation and polarization becoming much more difficult to overlook. It seems to me fairly obvious that any really large group of people--and certainly a country of hundreds of millions--can only in the hyperbole of court poets singing for their suppers be imagined as at all usefully generalizable as collectively attentive to the same thing in the same moment and reacting to it in the same, conventional way.

Did we all attend to, for example, the grotesque stupidities of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan melodrama with baited breath in the 1990s? I can most assuredly tell you that many of us were more interested in just about anything else you may care to name (and appalled when the venal idiots who run the mainstream news happily let it crowd other, more important events out of the headlines in their gleeful attentiveness to it).

But now in an age of digital media, in which the most extreme or idiosyncratic views have some chance to enter the public's consciousness, the pretense looks that much more foolish.

The result is that even the court poets (not an impressive bunch--court poets generally aren't) find it far more difficult to sing songs of a nation united in alarums and excursions, especially over the stupid things that usually inspire such. Rather the panics, which I suspect are as frequent as ever in this age of ever-escalating cyber-mainlined fear, shock and outrage, and perhaps even more so, simply happen to be the panic of a particular portion of society, not the whole.