Media hysteria occurs when tectonic plates shift and the culture changes - whether from social changes or new technology.
It manifests itself when seemingly new fears, illnesses, or anxieties - recovered memory, chronic fatigue syndrome, alien abduction, seduction by Internet molesters, electronic theft - are described as epidemic disorders in need of urgent recognition, redress, and attention.
For those of us who live, work, message, or play in new media, this is not an abstract offshoot of the information revolution, but a topic of some urgency: We are the carriers of these contagious ideas. We bear some of the responsibility and suffer many of the consequences.
Media hysteria is part of what causes the growing unease many of us feel about the toxic interaction between technology and information.
It is a phenomenon explored in a provocative new book by Princeton professor Elaine Showalter, a feminist scholar, medical historian, and respected cultural critic.
In her book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, Showalter has given a name to a media malady that has engulfed modern journalism, promoted divisiveness and fragmentation, advanced paranoia and conspiracy, and heightened a national culture of victimization. It's confused many of us about the depth and difficulty of important social issues.
We depend on the mass media to relay the truth about problems and dangers. But when media become transmitters of hysteria rather than bulwarks against it, the whole lens through which we look at government, culture, and society grows distorted.
This syndrome is familiar to Internet users who've watched, bewildered, as Net culture has become the object of such hysteria, as almost every imaginable kind of plague and perversion - pedophilia, illiteracy, addiction, social isolation, and ignorance - has been attributed to a largely benign new world.
The notion of pornography as dominant in the digital world, and as spreading rampantly via the Net, is a textbook example of how a legitimate concern becomes a hysterical one, repeated so inaccurately, pervasively, and intensely that it spreads like some social microbe and becomes a commonly assumed reality.
Hystories challenges the thoughtless way media absorb and transmit misleading, unsubstantiated, often panic-inspiring, stories about psychosomatic illnesses and paranoid plots. Showalter focuses on alien abductions, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memories, and satanic ritual abuse.
She doesn't allege that all these problems and disorders are faked or imagined. Some, she writes, connect strongly with modern social movements to produce real and severe psychological epidemics. But often, she argues, these symptoms appear to be generated by hysteria, not reality.
"When well-meaning crusaders see hysterical syndromes in the context of social crises and then publicize their views through modern communications networks," writes Showalter, "these misconceptions can give rise to epidemics and witch hunts."
Thus a nurse with chronic fatigue syndrome commits suicide with the help of Dr. Jack Kevorkian; Gulf War veterans struggle with mysterious illnesses that threaten their personal and work lives; a California executive is disgraced after his daughter; treated by her therapist with the hypnotic drug sodium amytal, claims he abused her as a child.
In fact, claims Showalter, there are thousands of victims of these modern, media-transmitted hysterias - casualties who will, in time, be viewed much as the Salem "witches" hung hundreds of years ago.
The idea of hysteria comes from the Greeks, who saw it as peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus. More recently, the term has come to mean behavior exhibiting overwhelming fear or emotional excess. It has a medical and psychological meaning, too: a psychoneurosis manifested by emotional excitability and sometimes severe disturbances of the psychic and sensory functions.
We tend to think of it as a word from the past, something that afflicted troubled Victorians or that Freud treated in the early days of psychoanalysis. But reports of its demise, writes Showalter, are premature. Hysteria prospers and is on display in much of modern media.
"Contemporary hysterical patients blame external sources - a virus, sexual molestation, chemical warfare, satanic conspiracy, alien infiltration - for psychic problems," she says. Long after Freud, many still refuse to accept psychological explanations for physical symptoms. Believing that psychosomatic disorders are illegitimate, they search for physical evidence that, says Showalter, "firmly places cause and cure outside the self.'
Thus hysteria not only survives into the l990s, but is more contagious than ever, spread by information technology, travel, and interactive media. The cultural narratives of hysteria, Showalter's "hystories," multiply rapidly and uncontrollably via talk shows and self-help books, magazines and movies, the Net and email.
And as we approach the millennium, she writes, the epidemics of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudomemories flooding the media are merging with the more generalized paranoias, religious revivals, and conspiracy theories that have always characterized American life.
Here, Showalter's alarms seem overblown. While millennial tragedies like the Heaven's Gate suicides will sadly but inevitably recur, over-hyped Americans are much more likely to squander their life savings to get to Disney World on the millennial eve, or spend the night with Oprah, or buy gazillion-dollar platinum millennial coins, than they are to make themselves sick.
Media hysteria threatens us not so much with millennial madness as with a fusion of technology, irresponsibility, manipulation, and politics that seems to spawn one awful malady after another and offers society two bad choices: to acquiesce or to be branded insensitive or corrupt.
It also produces a civic nightmare in which all accusations are presumed to be true, and all experts and leaders assumed to be corrupt.
Our greatest menace here is an information culture that advances the idea that all these alleged afflictions are real, that offers little protection to people who suffer devastating accusations made in dubious circumstances, and that defines serious reporting as unthinkingly supporting these ideas rather than questioning or even scrutinizing them.
Modern media seem to give weight only to victims and accusers, not to researchers, doctors, or government workers who, if they demur, are accused of coverup, bigotry, or callousness.
Journalists often uncritically embrace allegations of abuse, bias, victimization, and conspiracy (perhaps because, in the past, they have chosen to ignore real abuse and victimization).
That most of these phenomena sometimes exist doesn't mean that all of them always exist. But citizens forced to depend on journalism to learn which do and which don't are largely out of luck.
