Study claims that people are unmoved and apathetic toward bad news

[AmilcarCabral]

Dear comrades. No wonder that even within the economic crisis of countries like Europe, Italy, UK, USA, Japan and many other nations that have been in economic crisis since 2007 until today, there isn't still an objective communist revolutionary situation yet. All we see is isolated protests, not super powerful leftist organized united movements.

Because an academic study suggests that people who are told about awful things happening abroad in the news often remain unmoved by the reports.
Aid agencies refer to so-called compassion fatigue, which means people do not feel sympathy for the victims of war or natural disaster indefinitely.
However, journalists argue that if reporters can find a way of bringing the reality of suffering home, then audiences may feel sufficiently moved to demand that something be done.

Source of this news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25754275


.

[consuming negativity]

I mean it seems obvious to me that people who only experience oppression via hearing about it on the news aren't going to take up arms and go revolt.

[RedThinker]

In earlier periods the proletarians a more centered group, as the industrialized society started to bloom. In this time Marx saw the the revolution digging in underground tunnels coming up as it needed (1830, 1848, 1870). However as Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt's "Empire" tries to explain, is that the revolution today is more like a snake. There is no big revolution but small revolutions going on all the time, everywhere. This is a very short explanation. But try to read "Empire" its good reading :)!

Else the chapter is called "The mole and the snake" (Translated from my book, in Danish)

[Per Levy]

id even go a step further and say that even bad news that happen in ones neighbourhood wont touch most people, cause we hear, read, expierence so many shit things everyday you just get used to it and dont care all that much anymore.


All we see is isolated protests, not super powerful leftist organized united movements.

cause "united powerful leftists organization" is super importend, nevermind the working class, leftists organizations is all that matters.

[Le Socialiste]

cause "united powerful leftists organization" is super importend, nevermind the working class, leftists organizations is all that matters.

While I agree that TrotskistMarxist's argument borders too far on the simplistic side of things, to ignore or belittle the historical role and importance of the revolutionary left as an organized, organic element of the working-class movement is as dangerous as assuming only "united powerful leftist organizations" possess the key to initiating change. Both are misguided insofar as they carry the question of organization too far in either direction - with questionable results. One misinterprets the dialectical relationship between class and party, elevating it to ridiculous heights; the other almost goes so far as to dismiss it. At the same time moments of mass mobilization, when they do occur - and here I would add that this kind of self-activity has in fact risen in the last several years or so - cannot endure forever. The task that falls to us, I'd argue, consists of building more durable political organizations over the longterm, ones capable of establishing and cultivating deep roots in the class and wider society. Such projects take years of course, but building the kind of organic connection(s) necessary to achieve all this can be a lengthy process, one aided and strengthened by the contributions and insights of a revolutionary, working-class party rooted in the struggles of the workers and the oppressed.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

its probably more a form of immunity given that there's so much of it.

[JudasMaiden]

The mainstream corporate media(Fox News, CNN, Abc news, NBC news for example) now glorifies celebrities or other stupid shit like some overrated YouTube music video (like "What does the Fox say" or "Gangnam Style") due to people not caring about the world's problems. If you ask most people on what is happening in the world, they would probably be talking about the Oscar awards winners, Fashion, Video games, Sports, Television, Amusement parks, or all that other crap. People tend to talk about that, but they never talk about the workers' riot in Vietnam, the NSA spying, or the embargo against Cuba.

I literally taped pictures of what my friend, William Howard Taft, made around my neighborhood. I taped it when I was scootering because I wanted to awaken the masses around me from their ignorant, apathetic slumber. When I was done putting them, I noticed that 2 of them were already gone (I am not surprised either way that either they ripped it off or they could have gotten it as actual information to look at). Are any of you willing to do the same thing? (You could not only do this in your neighborhood, but at your workplace, school, house of worship like a church or mosque, etc.)

[RedWaves]

This type of bullshit is exactly why we have cats rescued from a tree in the news and dumb shit like that.


Most news is centered around some kind of fear epidemic to keep people distracted. Weather it be brown people in the middle east, NSA, or the national deficit, it's normally something there to reassure you that you need to be scared at all times. Mainstream news keeps us in the dark a lot more than people understand. All the celebrity and Youtube stuff isn't even fucking news, it's just a distraction. They don't want you to wake up and then challenge your corporate slave masters by wanting change. The minute people even start to wake up and realize that this capitalist imperialist system is what is fucking them, they get distracted by some shit pushed to the forefront by the national media and it works every time. The worst part is they don't even have to try hard to put people back to sleep. All you have to do is run some propaganda about brown people in the middle east killing da troops or talk about North Korea, and it works every time. They don't even get aggressive with this shit, cause they don't have to. Western society in general is so easy to control, it always has been.

On my local news they talk about football more than anything. That's the best example I can give you, they run through the local news for 10 minutes, then spend 30 minutes talking about a fucking sport.

Fact is, people are more entertained by distractions than actual news. They don't care about news. That's why people watch FOX News. It gives them some boogieman to blame everything on, even though the "News" in FOX News most the time isn't even real stuff, it's just fabricated propaganda bullshit to appeal to the average dumb white people that need some kind of enemy and some kind of threat to stress them out with bullshit. That's why 90% of what you see on there is racism targeted to minorities and then the "they hate Christians" bullshit.


People don't like News period. That's a fact. They rather hear about goddamn Tim Tebow or some other celebrity than hear real news, and when we get real news we don't even get the reality of it. Look at how no news station has ever broke down and explained Obamacare. Even CNN who defends it can't really come down and break it down to people, while FOX "News" is constantly creating hoaxes about it.


Real News don't exist in America. The only news people like over here is some bullshit about how North Korea is going to kill us all or sports or celebrity related.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

The mainstream corporate media(Fox News, CNN, Abc news, NBC news for example) now glorifies celebrities or other stupid shit like some overrated YouTube music video (like "What does the Fox say" or "Gangnam Style") due to people not caring about the world's problems. If you ask most people on what is happening in the world, they would probably be talking about the Oscar awards winners, Fashion, Video games, Sports, Television, Amusement parks, or all that other crap. People tend to talk about that, but they never talk about the workers' riot in Vietnam, the NSA spying, or the embargo against Cuba.

I literally taped pictures of what my friend, William Howard Taft, made around my neighborhood. I taped it when I was scootering because I wanted to awaken the masses around me from their ignorant, apathetic slumber. When I was done putting them, I noticed that 2 of them were already gone (I am not surprised either way that either they ripped it off or they could have gotten it as actual information to look at). Are any of you willing to do the same thing? (You could not only do this in your neighborhood, but at your workplace, school, house of worship like a church or mosque, etc.)

This post sounds so earnest it could easily be a troll. People are bombarded with images 24/7, the idea that some simple fliers taped to telephone poles or stapled onto community bulletin boards could be enough to 'awaken the masses' is pretty naive. People know that bad things are happening in their community and everywhere else. We're told that we are powerless to stop it, and most people believe it. If thats the case why even pay attention to it?

[GiantMonkeyMan]

The article mentions that people who watch longer pieces, hour long documentaries etc, about important events then they get a lot more emotionally invested in the story. I think, and I'm making this assumption based on my own gut feelings, that people watch the news not to invest themselves in a current event but to get a glimpse at the various goings on in the world like a person might skim read a newspaper to check out the headlines but not read in depth about certain stories. Contemporary news, which spends at most 2-3 minutes on each event, facilitates this type of viewing.

[Slavic]

Dear comrades. No wonder that even within the economic crisis of countries like Europe, Italy, UK, USA, Japan and many other nations that have been in economic crisis since 2007 until today, there isn't still an objective communist revolutionary situation yet. All we see is isolated protests, not super powerful leftist organized united movements.

Because an academic study suggests that people who are told about awful things happening abroad in the news often remain unmoved by the reports.
Aid agencies refer to so-called compassion fatigue, which means people do not feel sympathy for the victims of war or natural disaster indefinitely.
However, journalists argue that if reporters can find a way of bringing the reality of suffering home, then audiences may feel sufficiently moved to demand that something be done.
Source of this news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25754275.

Do tell me, were the people who took part in the revolutionary movements of 19th century Europe more or less apathetic then people today?

[Le Socialiste]

Well, at least I tried to awaken the people around me with these fliers. All of the fliers were taken down the next morning. What are other ways to awaken the masses you suggest other than myself taping fliers to a light or a wall in my neighborhood?

To begin with, we ought to drop the paternalistic attitude.

Edit - I should add that it's great you are ready and willing to do something, but there are other ways to go about it. Look into the community around you, or the town/city at large - what are people struggling with? Foreclosures, police brutality, etc.? If there's something going on, be prepared to get involved.

[William Howard Taft]

I literally taped pictures of what my friend, William Howard Taft, made around my neighborhood. I taped it when I was scootering because I wanted to awaken the masses around me from their ignorant, apathetic slumber. When I was done putting them, I noticed that 2 of them were already gone (I am not surprised either way that either they ripped it off or they could have gotten it as actual information to look at). Are any of you willing to do the same thing? (You could not only do this in your neighborhood, but at your workplace, school, house of worship like a church or mosque, etc.)

Comrade, I believe you have mistaken me for BeonB. Wouldn't I have been the first to tell you how pitiful such an attempt would be to "awaken the masses" through an ineffective medium?

[JudasMaiden]

Oh yeah, you're right, it was BeonB, not you. Sorry fellow comrade.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I don't know whether we should view this as surprising. Empathy is not the outcome of a spontaneous burst of emotion; it is a process that can only come to completion if an individual feels, in familiarity, the events that are occurring. In education lingo, Dewey called this 'felt difficulty', the 'felt' part being that which leads to empathy on the part of the student; rather than viewing events from afar, the students view the events from the perspective of those who were present at the time. This avoids anachronistic, presentist views of history, and also elicits an empathy on the part of the student, which results in a more accurate and compassionate historical understanding.

So no, given that the above is a 'known known', it is not a surprise that just being told about things happening does not elicit an empathetic response.