Credibility, fear, and communication

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Title	Document title	Credibility, fear, and communication
Created by	Author’s name, institution, country	Federico Rey Lennon;
3. Subject	Discipline
3. Subject	Keyword(s)
4. Description	Abstract	Since September 11, 2001, fear in contemporary society has significantly increased. The main responsibilities of this fearful society are modern individualization, on the one hand, and information that exacerbates the perception of risk, on the other. We have replaced communities and close associations with the individual duty of interest, concern, and attachment to oneself; consequently, society has been built over contingency spaces. Through the information received from social media, the suspicion in the existence of a malevolent motivation in certain specific subjects, or groups, is formed in the head of the common citizen, and therefore fear is inoculated in their daily actions. Fear is paralyzing, conspiring, manipulating, and fragmenting within society. Society is constantly subjected to media fear that spreads through social networks with unusual speed. And this causes, in the different groups, a limitation of social ties, even a collective silencing, since, seeing the other as a potential aggressor, they abstain from giving their opinion and let the media speak for the rest. In short, when the visibility of risks is increased or, on the contrary, hidden, fear is exacerbated or silenced. But both power strategies generate a loss of control that can lead to misplaced, thoughtless, and fear-driven actions.
5. Editorial	Organizing institution, location	Universidad Francisco de Vitoria
6. Collaborator	Sponsor
7. Date	(DD-MM-AAAA)	2023-02-13
8. Type	State and gender	Article peer-reviewed, double-blind
8. Type	Type
9. Format	File format	PDF
10. Identifier	Uniform resource identifier	https://comunicacionyhombre.com/en/article/credibility-fear-and-communication/
11. Source	Title; vol., num. (year)	Comunicación y Hombre; Num. 19 (2023): THE COMMUNICATION OF FEAR
12. Language	English=en
13. Relationship	Complementary files
14. Coverage	Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (sex, age, etc.)
15. Rights	Copyright and permissions	Copyright (c) 2017 Universidad Francisco de Vitoria This work is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivable 4.0 International license.

Dublin Core

PKP Metadata elements

Document metadata

Title

Document title

Credibility, fear, and communication

Created by

Author’s name, institution, country

Federico Rey Lennon;

3. Subject

Discipline

3. Subject

Keyword(s)

4. Description

Abstract

Since September 11, 2001, fear in contemporary society has significantly increased. The main responsibilities of this fearful society are modern individualization, on the one hand, and information that exacerbates the perception of risk, on the other. We have replaced communities and close associations with the individual duty of interest, concern, and attachment to oneself; consequently, society has been built over contingency spaces. Through the information received from social media, the suspicion in the existence of a malevolent motivation in certain specific subjects, or groups, is formed in the head of the common citizen, and therefore fear is inoculated in their daily actions. Fear is paralyzing, conspiring, manipulating, and fragmenting within society. Society is constantly subjected to media fear that spreads through social networks with unusual speed. And this causes, in the different groups, a limitation of social ties, even a collective silencing, since, seeing the other as a potential aggressor, they abstain from giving their opinion and let the media speak for the rest. In short, when the visibility of risks is increased or, on the contrary, hidden, fear is exacerbated or silenced. But both power strategies generate a loss of control that can lead to misplaced, thoughtless, and fear-driven actions.

5. Editorial

Organizing institution, location

Universidad Francisco de Vitoria

6. Collaborator

Sponsor

7. Date

(DD-MM-AAAA)

2023-02-13

8. Type

State and gender

Article peer-reviewed, double-blind

8. Type

Type

9. Format

File format

PDF

10. Identifier

Uniform resource identifier

https://comunicacionyhombre.com/en/article/credibility-fear-and-communication/

11. Source

Title; vol., num. (year)

Comunicación y Hombre; Num. 19 (2023): THE COMMUNICATION OF FEAR

12. Language

English=en

13. Relationship

Complementary files

14. Coverage

Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (sex, age, etc.)

15. Rights

Copyright (c) 2017 Universidad Francisco de Vitoria
This work is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivable 4.0 International license.

Abstract

Since September 11, 2001, fear in contemporary society has significantly increased. The main responsibilities of this fearful society are modern individualization, on the one hand, and information that exacerbates the perception of risk, on the other. We have replaced communities and close associations with the individual duty of interest, concern, and attachment to oneself; consequently, society has been built over contingency spaces.
Through the information received from social media, the suspicion in the existence of a malevolent motivation in certain specific subjects, or groups, is formed in the head of the common citizen, and therefore fear is inoculated in their daily actions.
Fear is paralyzing, conspiring, manipulating, and fragmenting within society. Society is constantly subjected to media fear that spreads through social networks with unusual speed. And this causes, in the different groups, a limitation of social ties, even a collective silencing, since, seeing the other as a potential aggressor, they abstain from giving their opinion and let the media speak for the rest.
In short, when the visibility of risks is increased or, on the contrary, hidden, fear is exacerbated or silenced. But both power strategies generate a loss of control that can lead to misplaced, thoughtless, and fear-driven actions.

1. Introduction. The new fears of contemporary society

Human beings have an instinctive reaction, an innate fear, which is a constitutive part of our biological being and which since the beginning of humanity has served to protect us. This is not the fear that we will deal with here, but we will refer to:

The fear that, we learn, the one that allows society to keep me at bay, to place me in a place, a role, the fear that separates me from others, the one that does not let me assume my own sexuality or gender choice, the fear of being in the place of the different, what Eric Fromm calls «the fear of freedom»; a fear learned and conditioned by each culture (Barei, 2020, p. 46).

We begin this reflection on fear in contemporary society with the paradox posed by Bauman (2007): the people who live in the richest and most modernized part of the world are the ones who feel most threatened, insecure and frightened, more inclined to panic and more passionate about everything related to security and protection. Objectively, we are dealing with the people who could be considered the safest in the history of humanity, for whom the dangers that threaten their lives are fewer and more isolated than those that threatened human life in the past and those that currently threaten it in the least developed on the planet.

Bauman points out that these people have «exceptionally ingenious and effective means of anticipating, preventing, and combating some of the dangers that could nonetheless kill us at a younger age or make us sick.» It is that there is evidence of an apparently unstoppable rise in the degree of protection possessed by those who inhabit that portion of the planet that we call the developed world, protection on the three fronts on which life is defended: «against the superior forces of nature, against the innate weak points of our bodies and against the dangers that emanate from the aggression of other people» (Bauman, 2007, p. 167).

Now, fear, Barei maintains, is also necessary to society. Both for survival and for the silencing of people, «fear is a cultural instrument» (Barei, 2020, p. 54).

Although fears have always coexisted with humanity, their magnitude and nature are very different today. Farré Coma maintains that:

The circle of fear, thanks to the work of the media and popular culture, has become the frame from which we evoke the processes of victimization of others in secularized societies where the fear of God no longer leads us to salvation (Farré Coma, 2005, p. 113).

Fear, therefore, is an emotion, and both Boria and Barei (2020) and Farré Coma (2005) agree that it is a dimension that links apparently separate areas of social life. It is a general orientation of where the danger is imminent and the only response is to avoid the source of the fear or attack the object that causes it.

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