Blaming EDM
EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music, but with the media, it might as well stand for Ecstasy, Drugs, and Molly. Since its into mainstream culture, EDM has been blamed for promoting drug culture. It seems like for every concert and festival, there is a shocking headline stating the number of casualties. As a result, there has been public outrage towards the genre and what it stands for. If we were to look more deeply into the realities behind it, we see that many of the claims are distorted and that EDM concerts have as many casualties during their concerts as concerts in other genres. So how does misinformation like this spread? The answer may lie in information cascades.
According to an article by the Washington Post, when a person is making an opinion on where they stand on a topic, they’re ambivalent about, they will usually go with whatever they think the general consensus is because the logic is: if the majority of the people have that opinion, they must have some information that I don’t. We can see that this is what happened with the view on EDM. Since the “early adopters” of the opinion were local news stations (who found out that a teenager died from an unheard of drug) they were able to introduce the idea that EDM is a drug culture to many of their viewers. As a result, many of the people became outraged and bigger TV networks focused on the story because of the outrage it caused. Because of the great reach of the media, this idea spread quickly.
What’s interesting about the way this opinion spread that we didn’t talk about in class is how certain “nodes” are more weighted than others. I feel that one factor that contributed to this notion of EDM was the fact that it was on a news channel. Already in our minds, the news represents the voice of many people as well as the fact that they are credible. As a result, opinions stated by the news have a much bigger influence on others who have not made a decision, which in turn makes getting an idea over the cascade threshold more easy. Instead of getting a majority to hold an opinion, one can use the media to lower the threshold of people (i.e. hearing it on two news channels is the same as the majority believing it) . This is why the media is so dangerous and why it’s important for the media to check its facts often instead of going for sensationalist headlines.
SOURCES:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/30/opinion-polls-can-be-self-fulfilling-prophecies/
http://www.dancingastronaut.com/2014/07/editorial-dance-music-found-bullseye-medias-target-can-turn-tide/