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December 28, 2004
A brief perspective of the on-line interest in human tragedy
Topics: Middle East News and PerspectivesI'd like to take a brief moment to offer a little perspective in the on-line interest of human tragedy. Two terrible events have occured only days apart, one being the murder by homicide bomber of 22 members of our armed forces while sitting down to eat in a mess tent, the other being a tsunami in southeast Asia that killed over 42,000 people going about their daily lives, and that number is certain to rise to over 50,000(video).
A quick check on the number of hits on Hyscience during a single peak hour for posts related to the Mosul bombing that killed 22 troops - 151. The number of hits on Hyscience during a single peak hour for posts related to the tsunami that killed over 42,000 people - 15. That is an interest factor of ten times greater for a military-related disaster that killed 22 than for natural disaster that killed nearly 50,000. I am very much aware that the Mosul bombing involved "our" guys and that the war on terror affects all of us very closely, whereas the tsunami in southeast Asia seems 'far away' from our immediate concerns. I am happy to have the traffic in either case but I thought you might be interested in taking a look at some numbers that give us a perspective on the on-line interest in these two very different human tragedies.
I might add that during the same hour that the above 151 hits for the Mosul posts and the 15 hits for the tsunami posts occured, those two posts together constituted 79% of all the hits at Hyscience. Posts that usually drew much larger numbers drew no attention while disaster-related posts drew all of the attention. I am not trying to draw any conclusions on this but I think it does tell us a little about how we view world events. I hope readers will offer some comments on this topic - I am no psychologist and find the data a little perplexing.
One last little caveat. Chad at inTheBullPen and I have shared emails that discussed this so I know that other bloggers experience very similar traffic patters. But our 'visually-oriented' on-line society will flock to a story that has the word "video" or the word "image" in it - at least 10 times more in number of post visits(Hyscience data only) than a story that has neither word. I have no point to make here, I just thought you might be interested in the above perspectives. Comments are invited.
Posted by Hyscience at December 28, 2004 1:04 PM
I think what we have here is the reason why media companies glorify violence and tragedy. Despite numerous complaints by the same people people who only watch and follow news for only covering dark topics, as humans we have some characteristic that draws us to tragedy.
As an old journalism professor of mine once told me, "Violence sells, so sell it." It's a sad occurrence, but it is the truth. Name one other reason why sites such as Ogrish get any visitors?
Posted by: Chad Evans at December 28, 2004 2:25 PM
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