What’s New
LATEST UPDATES/ADDITIONS:
10 September 2007:
• Stress
contagion – short article on the infectiousness
of stress/anxiety, and how best to avoid it.
• News –
Banks refund £2.6bn to customers, former
Crimewatch host accuses media of fearmongering,
government to use lie detectors on benefits
claimants, media coverage of latest crime figures...
and more.
• Diary of Distractions
– Research tells us that people base their
fears more on the vividness of events
than on the probability of them reoccurring.
And the press compete in terms of vividness
of shocking coverage, with predictable results.
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updates?
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our email newsletter, “News &
Distraction” >
Other recent updates/additions:
• New Rant –
BBC exaggerates driving test identity fraud:
BBC news reported flimsy speculation as fact
in this headline story.
• Today's Sermon
II – A new "sermon" on how
to distinguish between absolute blame
and practical blame – in order to
avoid hysterical blaming frenzies.
• Dialogue
with BBC's Mark Easton (on
crime reporting) – Our recent
correspondence with the BBC reporter about scaremongering
BBC crime reports.
• Media
Hell – Our new media website
is now online. It's like Anxiety Culture,
but more focused on media. Includes a discussion
board.
• Office
Slave – New installment of our column
for the Guardian newspaper.
• Fear of
Food – media scaremongering
on issues relating to food. Originally published
in the Idler's food issue.
• BBC's
misleading crime headlines – We noticed
a pattern of crime misreporting on BBC News
Online – a consistent cherry-picking
of "rises" in crime (which often weren't
rises at all).
• "Real"
positive thinking – The type of positive
thinking that needn't upset pessimists.
• Household
debt & bank rip-offs – How banks
profit from the poor, the low-paid and the financially
desperate.
• Web Witch-hunts
– An unpleasant new phenomenon: Internet-based
smear campaigns and witch-hunts. This article
approaches the subject via Marshall McLuhan's
"the medium is the message",
and via Nietzsche's take on "morality".
• Complaint to BBC
– The BBC upholds our complaint about its
scaremongering and erroneous crime reporting.
• Everything They Told
You is Wrong – A new ebook (208 pages),
by Anxiety Culture editor Brian Dean.
This is now available to download, together
with The Lazy Person’s Guide to Power
and PDF versions of the original Anxiety
Culture magazine (back issues 1-3). All
we ask is a small online donation to help us
keep the site running.
COMING SOON:
• Empire of Emotion Part 2 –
Continuing the "Control Systems" series
article. See Part 1 here
>
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