How Scary Is it?

I like listening to podcasts when driving. I find commercial radio to be vapid and news radio to be overly sensationalized. And while I understand that obtaining information from podcasts creates something of an information bubble (since I can pick and chose which podcasts I listen to), the ability to always have something I'm actually interested to listen to is helpful. One of the side effects of listening to several episodes of different podcasts in succession on days when I wind up being in the car for an extended period is that the similarities in them become more noticeable.

And one similarity that a number of news and commentary podcasts have is a tendency to ask the question "how frightened should we/people be?" It comes up in a number of contexts; it's something of a opener, I think. The person fielding the question understands it as an invitation to expound on the topic being discussed at length, and is usually obliging.

But I've come to wonder how audiences take it. Whether the actual incidence has gone up, or it's simply more acceptable to talk about, I don't know, but there seems to be more and more anxiety in American society, compared to when I was a young adult just out of college. And part of me wonders if framing things in terms of whether one should be worried about them contributes to that. It seems logical to me that it would, but that doesn't really count for anything. There are any number of things that seem logical to me that are at odds with the way the world actually works.

Part of me suspects that it's simply a matter of the medium itself. Not that asking the question is unique to podcasting, but the ability to listen to podcasts while doing something else, in my case, driving, means that I can listen to a lot of them. It's possible that print and television interviews asked the same question when I was younger, and I simply never encountered them, due to the infrequency with which I read print journalism and watched interviews on television. On the other hand, perhaps I have the causality backwards. Maybe the question has arisen with the perception that people have become more and more anxious.

It's times like this that I think I missed a bet by not following up on my undergraduate degree by becoming a social sciences researcher. (Although even at the time, I suspect that I'd be that guy who was always in trouble for ethics violations, and I'd likely still be that guy now.) Because it's a fascinating question, and suspect that there's a lot of insight to be gained from the answer.