The Paranoia Timeline

“Paranoia is a thought process heavily influenced by anxiety or fear,

often to the point of irrationality and delusion.”

Wikipedia

The Paranoia Timeline is a project that i created for my last assignment of the Online Journalism module, of the MA Online Journalism at BCU (Birmingham City University). It is also an ongoing project, so it will never be finished.

The idea behind this project is to create a timeline of all the events that caused some type of social hysteria a bit throughout the world in the last 20 years. Some of the situations presented here were real dangers, others not really. But all caused disturbances in our daily lives: terrorism has changed the way we travel, the possible flu pandemics led whole nations into hospital emergency rooms with just one sneeze, and the world was about to end at least 5 times since 1990 leading some people to suicide. Earth still spins, and we have other problems that are more deadly and probably more important for the whole civilization and the planet than these, but we tend to forget them: diseases like malaria, AIDS, hepatitis, the destruction of forest resources throughout the world, they are well known situations but that don’t have as much visibility like these cyclical “events” that grab the attention of the media, the audience, the entertainment industry. Why does that happen? Why are we caught in these bursts of information, sometimes based  on speculative data and other times born out of the imagination of few and fed by the beliefs of many?

This is not a conspiracy website. It is a way to chart and provide information about the events that filled hours of newscasts, thousands of webpages and tons of newspapers and magazines, to be dropped into oblivion some time after, and in most cases, without the worst case scenario predictions. The question is, probably, how gullible we are, and how an acritical society takes stands on matters that is not able to fully understand, and thus shaping each individual’s life. Fortunately the Web has provided a room for all voices to be heard in their different views, and my goal here as a journalist is to provide clues for you to make your own mind.

Alex Gamela