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Jun 09School Shootings, Google Trends and Marilyn Manson
I am currently working on a conference paper related to our YouTube project. When I visited CAQR2009 earlier this month one of the participants, Silvana di Gregorio, gave an interesting presentation about online research tools. One of these were Google Trends which a free service that shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. I thought I’d try it out for the paper. By exporting the data to Excel and working further with it there, generating diagrams etc, I was able to sketch out an analysis very fast. I actually think that I can use this as a starting point for the paper (which will also include a number of other analyses).
Web activity in relation to three school shootings measured with Google Trends
Figure 1: Increased interest in names of locations of school shootings when they take place. Not surprising.
Figure 2 is more interesting: On events of school shootings there is an increased interest in political themes such as gun control, and pop culture themes such as Marilyn Manson. (Figure 2 is aggregated data from periods before and after all 3 above shootings).
Q: What does this mean?
A: It means that the societal reaction to incidents of school shootings follow the panic pattern described by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). In the case of gun control, for example, one might draw upon Stuart Hall’s (1978, p. 19) idea, from Policing the Crisis, that labels applied to dramatic public events are likely to mobilize an entire referential context with a set of associated connotations. Even though gun control ought to be discussed all of the time, the issue is specifically activated and understood in relation to certain things that happen in society. School shootings being one example.
As regards the case of Marilyn Manson, the peak in web activity in relation to incidents of school shootings can be understood in terms of sensitization (Cohen 1972, p. 83). Cohen writes that “a characteristic of hysteria” is that the wrong stimulus gets “chosen as the object of attack or fear”. School shootings are traumatizing events to society, and they make a number of targets more visible as candidates for social control. And these targets are of course not chosen randomly. As Cohen puts it, they are chosen “from groups already structurally vulnerable to social control”. And as Manson himself puts it: “I definitely can see why they would pick me. Because I think it’s easy to throw my face on the TV, because in the end, I’m a poster boy for fear. Because I represent what everyone is afraid of”.
