The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
Episode 31: Into the Great Wide Open
We're turning back the clock to 2009 to discuss an epochal turning point in our society, namely, the Balloon Boy incident. While perhaps not as "earth shattering" as some of the other topics we've covered, we make the argument that this incident does mark an important turning point in the nature of media, in that it was one the last "crises" to occur before the 24-hour news networks were subsumed by the all powerful, crushing rise of social media. We recap the incident, look a little bit at the family involved, and also consider the ways mass media events have been transformed in the 2010s and 2020s.
This episode contains spoilers for the Balloon Boy Incident (he wasn't in the balloon).
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