The Fluid Definition of Fear and the Consequences of High Exposure to the Affect of Fear

This article examines the role of mass media reporting in blurring U.S.-American citizens’ fear affect, leading to a normalization of school shootings. By analyzing three articles from the New York Times, spanning from 1999 to 2024, it uses Massumi’s concept of “fear blur” to demonstrate how the repetitive structure of news headlines can lead to a desensitization of fear. This desensitization suggests that the definition of fear is neither permanent nor universal. Massumi’s media affect is employed to consider how school shootings have become a low-level fear – an occurrence so pervasive in the United States that it no longer elicits the panic that followed the Columbine Shooting 25 years ago. Through close readings of three New York Times articles and Massumi’s The Politics of Everyday Fear (1993), this article demonstrates that the language used in media reports has blurred school shootings into “an endless series of like events” (Massumi 24) thereby altering the fear response of U.S. youth.