From Zero To Hero: When Free Publicity Turns Criminals Into Heroes

In daily encounters on TV, press editorials and news reports, the only reason seeming to compel insiders is their circulation or audience. Everyone else turns a blind eye to it. Nobody cares about knowing that the higher the audience, the more links to Twitter there’ll be or that the more likes on Facebook there’ll be, the seeds of gratuitous violence are more effectively sown. This is called emulation or, in the psychopathology of communication, the “Werther effect”. Our society is full of frustrated individuals who ascribe their own failings to the world around them and it may be the case that some marginalised people regard themselves as being rather low on the social scale and therefore choose to give themselves hero status, worthy of the newspaper front pages. Consequently, they may happen to take action by seizing a firearm in search of verification of them transforming their empty existence into stuff of legend, giving enough to take about for days, months and years to come. Such a breakthrough, from zero to hero!

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Þýðandi: Rhys Llwyd

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Rafbók: 13 december 2023