Welcome to Political Hypochondria

Hello, Everyone…

Here Comes the Intro

Welcome to my blog, Political Hypochondria! My name is Ebony, and I’m a transfer student in my first semester at Kennesaw State University. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in History almost 20 years ago and hold a Master of Arts in Eastern European Studies. I have had a long-standing interest in and/or fascination with Slavic Studies. The genesis of my interest began in the mid-late 80s after watching Rocky IV. The idea an Italian American from Philadelphia sparked the end of the Cold War fascinates me. That film is the reason I learned Russian and Ukrainian. Rocky IV is why I chose a post-Soviet country to do my Peace Corps service (Armenia). You could say this movie subconsciously introduced me to the world of international relations and the concept of U.S. foreign policy interests.

“I must break you” is in my opinion one of the cheesiest yet iconic lines from a Rocky film.

I am very excited about this class and project, and I’m very excited about ways to apply knowledge and skills gained in this course into my work. For context, I work in global labor affairs—child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking to be exact—focusing on research and policy in those areas.

Getting Warmer

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the issue at hand: the blog. During one of my weekly visits to my mother’s house, I was greeted by the sound of something resembling scanning radio stations—fragments of songs and a medley of disk jockeys colliding into each other. Except it wasn’t coming from a radio; it was coming from my mother’s phone. Once the sounds became more audible, I recognized the tsunami of fearmongering opinions. It was none other than the social platform whose name mimics the sound of an analog clock.

For the record, I’ve never had 500 million friends on social media.

I’ve distanced myself from social media. I’ve never been into Twitter or Instagram. Facebook was always my go-to platform—a haven for spoilers galore. As someone who’s never enjoyed surprises, I happily tuned into Facebook for updates on shows like Dexter, True Blood, and, to an extent, Game of Thrones. During the pandemic, I found myself diving into TikTok. The 2020-2021 era of TikTok was like gold—but now it’s become more like lead-based paint with gold glittering.

The amount of gaslighting, manipulation, hysteria, and hypochondria has become too much to bear. As a result, I deleted the app. But my mother still has it, and as a 70-year-old soon-to-be retiree, that type of content entertains her. I suppose she deserves it. The content that filters to me, however, typically borders on political gaslighting and political hypochondria. As I type this, I realize Political Gaslighting would have been a good blog name too.

The Main Point

It’s taken me a while to find my focus, but here’s the purpose of this blog. I’m interested in understanding how political campaigns have historically used implicit messaging to influence public opinion, and how today’s shift to a more explicit style of messaging has impacted public perception and contributed to political hypochondria. Within this context, I want to analyze the virality of political hypochondria, media (many of the case studies will be social media) amplify concerns and anxieties, and how communities and echo chambers of hypochondria form around these issues. Many of the media and politics analysis will cover incidents and stories from the 1980s and 1990s.