The apocalypse has become the main topic of global media

Published 05.05.2024 | By Йосиф

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The apocalypse has become the main topic of global media and it scares scientists

studyfinds.org: The exponential growth of artificial intelligence over the past year has sparked debate about whether the era of human dominance on our planet is coming to an end. The most dire predictions are that the Machines will take over within five to ten years.

Fears of Artificial Intelligence are not the only public concern about the End of the World. Climate change and pandemic diseases are also well-known threats. Reporting these problems and calling them a potential “apocalypse” has become commonplace in the media – so common that it can go unnoticed or simply be written off as hyperbole.

Is the use of the word “apocalypse” significant in the media? Our shared interest in how the American public understands apocalyptic threats brought us together to answer this question. One of us is studying apocalypse in the ancient world, and the other is studying press coverage of modern issues.

By tracking what the media labels as “apocalyptic” events, we can understand how our fears of potential disasters are changing. We have found that discussions of the apocalypse bridge the ancient and the modern, the religious and the secular, the mystical and the rational. They show how a term with roots in classical Greece and early Christianity helps us express our deepest anxieties today.

What is an apocalypse?

People have been fascinated by the end of the world since ancient times. However, the word “apocalypse” was not intended to convey this concern. In Greek, the verb “apokalyptein” originally meant simply to reveal or reveal.

In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato used the term to describe how a doctor might ask a patient to expose his body for medical examination. He also used the word metaphorically when asking someone to express their thoughts.

The New Testament writers used the noun “apocalypse” to mean the “revelation” of God’s divine plan for the world. In the original Greek version, “apocalypse” is the first word of the Book of Revelation, which describes not only the approaching onset of a torturous hell for sinners, but also the second coming of Christ, which will bring eternal salvation to believers.

Apocalypse in the modern world.

Many American Christians today feel that God’s day of judgment is just around the corner. According to a December 2022 Pew Research Center poll, 39% of those surveyed believed they were “living in the end times” and 10% said Jesus would “definitely” or “probably” return in their lifetime ( according to recent polls “living” in end times” 92% of US believers) .

However, some believers do not view the Christian apocalypse entirely negatively. Rather, it is a moment that will exalt the righteous and cleanse the world of sinners.

The secular understanding of the word, by contrast, rarely includes this redemptive element. An apocalypse is more often understood as a catastrophic event that will irreparably change our world for the worse. This should be avoided rather than expected.

What we fear most, decade after decade.

Political communications researchers Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka demonstrate in their research that the media are likely to reflect public opinion even more than they direct or change it. While their research primarily focuses on Americans’ views on major policy decisions, they believe their findings apply beyond these areas.

If they are right, we can use discussions about the apocalypse in the media over the past few decades as a barometer of prevailing public fears.

Following this logic, we collected all articles that mentioned the words “apocalypse” or “apocalyptic” from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 2023. After filtering for religion and entertainment articles, there were 9,380 articles that mentioned one or more of four important apocalyptic issues: nuclear war, disease, climate change, and artificial intelligence.

Since the end of the Cold War, fears of a nuclear apocalypse have dominated not only the newspaper data we collected, but also visual media such as post-apocalyptic films. For example, the 1983 film “The Day After” was watched by about 100 million Americans, which indicated the beginning of interest in the topic raised.

However, by the 1990s, the number of articles linking the word “apocalypse” with climate and disease outnumbered the number of articles devoted to nuclear war. By the 2000s, and even more so in the 2010s, the attention of newspapers shifted towards environmental problems.

The 2020s broke this pattern. COVID-19 has caused a surge in articles mentioning the pandemic. In the first four years of this decade, there were almost three times as many publications linking disease to the apocalypse as in the entire 2010s.

Additionally, although AI received virtually no media coverage prior to 2015, recent technological breakthroughs have generated more apocalyptic articles regarding AI for the first time in 2023 than there were articles regarding nuclear issues in the 1980s.

What should we fear most?

Do the apocalyptic fears we read about most often represent the greatest danger to humanity? Some journalists have recently warned that nuclear war is more likely than we think.

This is consistent with the view of the Doomsday Clock scientists, who track what they consider to be critical threats to human existence. They mainly focus on nuclear issues, followed by climate, biological threats and artificial intelligence.

The use of apocalyptic language to describe these problems may seem to represent a growing secularization of the concept. For example, philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 as a potentially apocalyptic event reflects the replacement of religion with science. Similarly, cultural historian Eva Horn argues that the modern vision of the end of the world is an apocalypse without God.

However, as a Pew survey shows, apocalyptic thinking remains common among American Christians.

The key point is that both religious and secular views on the End of the World use the same word. Thus, in recent decades, the meaning of the word “apocalypse” has expanded from a purely religious idea to include other, more human-driven apocalyptic scenarios such as “nuclear apocalypse”, “climate apocalypse”, “COVID-19 apocalypse”, etc. Or the “AI apocalypse”, which is now at the very forefront.

In short, media reports of apocalypses do provide some revelation. The revelation is not about how the World will end, but about the ever-increasing number of ways in which this world can end. It also reveals a paradox: people today often imagine the future most vividly when they revive and adapt an ancient word.

AUTHORS: Eric Bleich – Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury, Christopher Star – Professor of Classics at Middlebury.

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