Panic Watch! Panicology

Posted March 06, 2008 by Shakti Sombrero

If you're looking for a high quality portable guide to media panic (and who the hell isn't?) check out Panicology, a new book by statisticians Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams. The book takes a hard look at over forty of today's latest and greatest scare stories and cuts through the nonsense with critical thinking and a bit of wit. In places the book is a tad UK-centric but most of the topics apply to us all--because they're the same damn ones that fill newspapers the world over on a daily basis. Superbugs. Crime. Nanotechnology. Frankenfoods. Overpopulation and alien invaders. It's all here folks.

The book also examines why we, as humans, can't seem to get enough of this stuff and want to blame ourselves for all of it.

We live in a complex world and we don't want to die. And in general we are winning the battle - we are living longer and more healthily than ever. Every year, death comes a year closer for all of us, meanwhile life gets a little better for many people. So why are we happy to panic about the silliest things?

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It's almost as if we have to be afraid of something, as if we carry about in our heads a bucket of worry that we are compelled to fill with whatever's available. Clearly, different individuals have different sized buckets.

The media doesn't get a free ride either.

Journalism is industrialized gossip... Once a newspaper's story about something extraordinary, say a killer-bee, has gone down well, others follow, rooting out killer-bee-related items that would otherwise have gone unreported, or building up killer-bee near-misses into full-blown dramas in their own right. The fact is that we love to be scared - which is why many of the topics we examine (and the bees) have their own disaster movies.

Even if you don't agree with every conclusion they draw, the authors are straight shooters with a good sense of humor. From the cover art featuring a spacesuit-clad man feeding pigeons, to a "panic scale" for each topic consisting of headless blood-squirting chickens, if you like Panic Watch! I'm pretty sure you'll like Panicology too.

We all know some people with pretty big buckets (many of them overflowing). So the next time one of them runs into the office waving the latest headline, sit them down with the appropriate chapter of this book and start that poor soul down the road of recovery.