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There are well-understood psychological limits on our capacity to process information. As information proliferation—the consumption and sharing of information—increases through social media and other communications technology, these limits create an attentional bottleneck, favoring information that is more likely to be searched for, attended to, comprehended, encoded, and later reproduced. In information-rich environments, this bottleneck influences the evolution of information via four forces of cognitive selection, selecting for information that is belief-consistent, negative, social, and predictive. Selection for belief-consistent information leads balanced information to support increasingly polarized views. Selection for negative information amplifies information about downside risks and crowds out potential benefits. Selection for social information drives herding, impairs objective assessments, and reduces exploration for solutions to hard problems. Selection for predictive patterns drives overfitting, the replication crisis, and risk seeking. This article summarizes the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection and presents eight warnings that represent severe pitfalls for the naive “informavore,” accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.

This book argues that Freud's mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients' symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients' lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma and its power in determining symptoms leads to Freud's break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain turning points in the development of his thought. It is Freud's scenography of trauma and fantasy that speaks to the student of literature and painting. Overall, the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in Freud's shift from a traumatic to a developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation of the infantile subject.

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to \"social media\" has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees--many of whom are former employees of social media companies--the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our \"social media malaise,\" and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan's 'hysterical' position in accordance with Robert Pfaller's notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence--delegated yet reluctantly disavowed--offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization.

Teenage schoolgirls in Le Roy, New York, captured the attention of the U.S. public in 2011 and 2012 when they developed acute motor and vocal tics. Dramatic images of the girls' involuntary movements were briefly seen on national news and social media before clinical neurologists diagnosed the girls with \"mass psychogenic illness\" and required their retreat from media as part of the cure. Drawing from perspectives in medical and linguistic anthropology as well as the anthropology of expertise, we interrogate how this diagnosis, called \"mass hysteria\" in a previous generation of Freudian psychology, came to be favored over attribution to a potential environmental cause. Neurologists countered the evidential vagueness of environmental claims by suggesting that material proof of psychological origin could lie in fMRI data, contributing to a public narrative on female adolescent brains and rural U.S. communities that foreclosed environmental inquiry.

This paper focuses on a particular type of emotional display known in the vernacular as \"hysteria,\" and on the \"socio-logic\" of such an affective state. Using calls to 9-1-1 as a case study, we discuss the ways in which the notion of \"hysteria\" is used in a particular occupational milieu and in certain situations to assess and account for a person's conduct. In that milieu, behaviors that might be deemed \"hysterical\" are those brought to the foreground by the interactional demands of the work situation. Someone is hysterical when he or she cannot cooperate in the accomplishment of some task required by the situation (as defined by those having or assuming a responsibility for what transpires in that situation). More generally, then, what might be termed a strong expression of sorrow, distress, or grief in one social context may be \"hysterical\" in another. Thus \"hysteria\" is as much interactional and (in certain institutional or work settings) organizational as emotional.

This paper interrogates the anxieties which crystallized in the summer of 2000 concerning the uses and abuses of ecstacy at local raves in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Despite the fact that concerted efforts were made on the part of a host of \"moral entrepreneurs\" to extinguish raves held on city-owned property, Toronto's rave communities were able to subvert the moralizing discourse designed to characterize them \"at risk,\" simultaneously manipulating the same discursive technique to amplify the risks associated with terminating \"legal\" raves in the city of Toronto. Conceptually situated in the sociology of moral regulation, the analysis explicates the fluid character of media discourses and the dynamic interplay of social agents in the social construction, and subversion, of moral panic. /// Ce mémoire étudie l'anxiété qui s'est cristallisée à l'été 2000 quant à la prise et à l'abus de prise d'ecstasy lors des raves qui ont lieu à Toronto en Ontario (Canada). Malgré les efforts concentrés de plusieurs \"autorités morales\" qui cherchaient à éliminer les raves se produisant sur les terrains appartenant à la ville, les groupes de raveurs ont pu détourner le discours moralisateur qui les présentait comme un risque pour la société, tout en manipulant la même technique de discours pour amplifier les risques associés à l'interdiction des raves \"légales\" dans la ville de Toronto. Conçue sur le plan de la sociologie des règlements moraux, cette analyse explique le caractère fluide du discours des médias et l'interaction dynamique des agents sociaux dans la construction sociale et la subversion de la panique morale.

This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of panics. The case studies it assembles examine the various ways in which panics and anxieties were generated in imperial situations and how they shook up the dynamics between seemingly all-powerful colonizers and the apparently defenceless colonized. Drawing from examples of the British, Dutch and German colonial experience, the volume sketches out some of the main areas (such as disease, native 'savagery' or sexual transgression) that generated panics or created anxieties in colonial settings and analyses the most common varieties of practical, discursive and epistemic strategies adopted by the colonisers to curb the perceived threats.

This Article explores the connections between emerging infectious diseases, domestic disease panics, global health, and the law by comparing the American response to Ebola to the initial American response to the AIDS epidemic. We demonstrate that in both cases the arrival of a new deadly disease was initially met with fear, stigma and the use of law to “other” those associated with the disease. We begin by reviewing the initial responses to the AIDS epidemic. We then offer a brief history of emerging infectious disease scares over the past few decades, highlighting the problematic rhetoric that paved the way for the Ebola panic. We then review the 2014 Ebola outbreak, noting its similarities and distinctions from the early AIDS epidemic. Finally, we examine United States policies regarding HIV and Ebola in Africa. We conclude with some tentative observations about the relationship between germ panics, law, and public health.

It is widely acknowledged that this is the age of moral panics. From the Bulger case to mad cow disease, newspaper headlines continually warn of some new danger and television programmes echo the theme with sensational docmenturies.This concise survey will help student trace the development of ideas of moral panic and to analyse how changing public perceptions are shaped and reflected through the media over time. Using examples drawn from:* club culture and raves* mugging* sex and AIDS* children, violence and the family.