“Yes, it's time to panic.
It really is time to panic.
I don't detect any panic out there at all.”
Zoë Schlanger’s July 8 2024 article, published by The Atlantic was spot-on in so many ways.
For a media scholar living in Los Santos, the rise of apps like Watch Duty, Citizen, MyShake, AirVisual and AirNow offers a fascinating glimpse into how technology is reshaping our relationship with catastrophe, collapse and crisis in real time. These apps deliver a continuous stream of updates, another kind of deluge - e.g., wildfires raging in real time, earthquakes registering within seconds, air quality quickly deteriorating, evacuation orders, curfews, and crime alerts flashing on our screens - creating a sense of constant emergency.
What’s truly intriguing is how these apps both heighten our awareness of imminent danger and, paradoxically, make it all too easy to grow numb to it. The rapid notification cycle fosters a kind of digital desensitization: the more we receive these alarming updates, the more we adapt to them, normalizing the catastrophe as collapse itself has become an integral part of daily life, the new normal. It’s a phenomenon that reflects a new kind of media saturation in the age in accelerating climate catastrophe. The baselines are shifting on a seemingly daily basis. Turns out that Exceptional circumstances were not so exceptional after all.
As climate models struggle to account for the accelerating pace of disasters and misinformation spreads like wildfire on social media and through the body politic, we find ourselves relying on these apps - a brief summary, a temporary banner, a chime, a short vibration - not only for 24/7 always on, real time information, but to help us make sense of a world in which rational behavior has become increasingly elusive. In this scarred landscape, where even our capacity for shock or surprise has been worn down, technology becomes both a lifeline and a numbing force: simultaneously helping us cope with and desensitize us to the polycrises unfolding around us.
