Humphreys added that there's a word for that problem: narcotizing dysfunction.
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The worst experiences are those where you feel the discussion sinking into a narcotizing morass of ideological reassurance.
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Among ordinary citizens, drones seem to have had a narcotizing effect, deadening the impulse to reflect on the harm they cause.
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But the series has neither the narcotizing nostalgia nor the impersonal monumentality that such cross-sections of fleetly passing life might fall into.
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Both are set in decaying manufacturing towns — places where the men and women scuff and strain against economic morbidity, class invisibility and narcotizing boredom.
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That's where "White Noise," the theater auteur Daniel Fish's personal distillation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, could be seen during the weekend — hypnotizing, narcotizing, infuriating and, on occasion, seriously waking up its audiences.
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He explains why: because people in the US are caught between narratives of who they actually are and who they want to be, and narcotizing, populist television circulates a story that always emphasizes the latter.
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Diagnosing Orsino an early modern "incel" — the term some misogynistic men use online to describe themselves as involuntarily celibate — and handing him a firearm may not square with the text, but it gooses the play's sometimes-narcotizing verse by hitting its grimmer notes.
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Narcotizing dysfunction is a theory that as mass media inundates people on a particular issue, they become apathetic to it, substituting knowledge for action.Baran et al. pp.179-80 quotation: It is suggested that the vast supply of communication Americans receive may elicit only a superficial concern with the problems of society. This would result in real societal action being neglected, while superficiality covers up mass apathy.
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Thus, it is termed "dysfunctional" as it indicates the inherent dysfunction of both mass media and social media during controversial incidents and events. The theory assumes that it is not in the best interests of people to form a social mass that is politically apathetic and inert. The term narcotizing dysfunction was identified in the article "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action", by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Robert K. Merton. Mass media's overwhelming flow of information has caused the populace to become passive in their social activism.
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The term _narcotizing dysfunction_ gained popularity from its use in the 1946 article "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action", by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. Along with the status conferral function (i.e., mass media bestow prestige and enhance the authority of individuals and groups by legitimizing their status) and the reaffirmation of social norms function (i.e., mass media enforce social norms by exposing deviations from these norms to public view), they spotted a third social significance of mass media that had gone largely unnoticed: a narcotizing effect making the masses of the population politically inert.
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The expression condenses three principles:the first supposition is that informational excess could lead to a tragic numbness and social detachment. It has to do with the social risks associated with technology use, namely, the threat of desensitizing the individual’s awareness by means of a surplus of means of communication. The second assumption relies on the assertion that to know is the same as to act. The narcotizing dysfunction draws attention to the fact that individuals tend to consider that because they are informed about a subject, they are necessarily concerned with it—as if there was a correspondence between information and political commitment.
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By the 1950s, there were increased concerns about the power of the mass media, and with Elihu Katz, Lazarsfeld published Personal Influence, which propounded the theory of a two- step flow of communication, opinion leadership, and of community as filters for the mass media. Along with Robert K. Merton, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction of media, along with its functional roles in society. His contribution of the two-step flow of communication from media to opinion leaders and then others; his research on the characteristics of opinion leaders; diffusion of medical innovations; uses and gratifications of receivers from day time radio soap operas, etc. His research led to a marriage between interpersonal communication and mass communication In 1956 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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The first of these is social status conferral function, or the way that the "mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements". The second function is the ‘enforcement of social norms’, where the mass media uses public exposure of events or behaviour, to expose ‘deviations from these norms to public view’. The third function, and perhaps best known, is the narcotizing dysfunction, in which energies of individuals in society are systematically routed away from organized action — because of the time and attention needed to simply keep up with reading or listening to mass media: ‘Exposure to this flood of information may serve to narcotize rather than to energize the average reader or listener’. The remainder of Lazarsfeld and Merton's paper discusses structure of ownership and operation of the mass media specific to the US— especially the fact that in the case of magazines, newspapers, and radio advertising ‘supports the enterprise’: ‘Big business finances the production and distribution of mass media … he who pays the piper generally calls the tune’.
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