I’ve been having fun over at Exhibit Asterisk, so I thought I’d update everyone over here how things were going and to point people to a few posts I’ve had fun with.
Perhaps my favorite post so far is one I did mapping the true crime ecosystem. I often hear people talk about “true crime” as though it’s a monolith, but as far as I can tell there are at least 29 different subgenres: https://exhibitasterisk.substack.com/p/the-true-crime-landscape-a-guide
I also looked at the major cases, and made a bit of a breakthrough that true crime is increasingly appealing to people because it’s a participatory genre: https://exhibitasterisk.substack.com/p/more-mapping-the-true-crime-ecosystem
If true crime is not your thing, I’ve done two posts on conspiracy theories. One on how selective use of true facts can lead people to believe in conspiracies, and one on how belief in conspiracies can change over time.
Finally, I paid homage to Slate Star Codex and the Toxoplasma of Rage in “Going Viral is Not a Meritocracy“, which ironically went mini-viral for me.
Head on over and follow me/subscribe if you’re interested! I always love seeing familiar faces, metaphorically speaking.
I wonder if there is a “primer case” usually/always needed to set off a media firestorm for these true crime cases? That is, how often is it that cases (not involving someone who was already a celebrity) need a prior case to really “hit the bigs”? That would also explain why the famous case is usually “worse”, in the sense that the facts are less clear cut, the defendant is more ambiguous, the victim is less appealing, the police are less competent, etc– the “better” primer case started cracking the seal, as it were, and then the “worse” case could bust through, and the pure messiness of the second case kept it going. –Janet
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That’s a really interesting idea, and one I’ll keep in mind. I’ve actually been wondering if you could “reverse engineer” a viral case, and I suspect heavily that something like that is a factor. One thing I’ve wondered though is if the “primer case” is always a case or if it could be a different event that is similar enough to get people upset/create the cracks. I have to go find it again but I read somewhere that most witch hunts (literal not figurative) in medieval Europe took place after political unrest, which suggests the “primer event” could be a wide variety of things.
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