Examining the Media / Mass Shooter Symbiosis

Mass shooters and the media are a symbiotic meme. Each reinforces the other, and some ride this symbiosis to riches while others die. And nobody talks about this, especially the media, because they don’t want to let the very lucrative cat out of the very deadly bag. But I’ll do it, since I don’t make that much money anyway. Let’s first look at my numbers, then at some good science on the subject, then wrap the whole thing up into a nice ugly, gore-soaked package. We also talk music, which it turns out, is important.

HWFO

You’re currently reading a blog that’s 50% gun statistics, 50% culture war analysis, and 85% media criticism, owing to how Venn Diagrams work.

basic breakdown of HWFO material

I like the cultural analysis stuff better, personally, but you must trust me when I say this, the gun articles get all the traffic. If I were trying to make money from this endeavor, I would only write gun articles. And here’s why.

my Medium traffic the past month

If I write nothing, I get somewhere between 500 and 1000 views a day on this publication, just from residual traffic on old articles. But on August 4th, I got 2,736. On August 5th, I got 15,029. I must have really written a balling article on August 3rd.

But I didn’t write a thing.

What did happen on August 3rd? Someone killed 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso.

My August 4th article must have been pretty incredible, though, right? The day after the shooting? 15,000 hits say it had to be a great one.

Didn’t write a thing.

Someone else killed ten more people in Dayton.

But they both used guns, and those shots are like the clapper in a giant, insane, social media bell. Massive arguments about gun control reverberate through Twitter and Facebook, fed by the media, as people constantly link articles that they find useful in yelling at each other, driven by their own anxieties. And every link drives a click, and every click earns some media behemoth a third of a penny, give or take. And when I say they’re ringing the bell, I’m not joking. It is an actual bell. Let’s talk about bells.

Sound Synthesis and the Reverberation of Gore

One of the first things anyone learns when they get their first synthesizer, is how ADSR envelopes work.

Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release. These are amplitude parameters, or to layman, the volume of a synthesizer note. How loud it is. Attack is how long the note grows in volume, decay is how quickly it falls off while the key is still held, sustain is the volume it maintains after the initial key strike, and release is how long the note takes to fade away. Here’s a snapshot of how you’d set up Ableton’s Operator synthesizer to replicate a bell: