Steven Hyden, a prominent musico-social critic, attempts a diagnosis of the drear times of 2018. His finding is not clear-cut, but Richard Hofstadter wrote of the national rejection of Herbert Hoover in 1932: "Perhaps ... it was the spirit of the people that was not fundamentally sound." Perhaps, indeed. The actions and image of Herbert Hoover — in newsreel footage — teasing his dogs to dance on their hind legs while waving pork chops (not scraps) above their noses was a real mood-killer in 1931-1932. Of course, this blog is voice of a great deal of negativism, but the current occupant of the Oval Office is scarcely an uplifting presence. If this is (fair & balanced) rejection of miasma, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap 'Zine]
Is The National "Mood" The One In Polls Or The One Online?
By Steven Hyden
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Nobody looks in the mirror and sees an archetype. The world may define you as a millennial or a Trump voter or a “Star Wars” bro, but inside your own head, you are you — an individual with thoughts, emotions and experiences as particular as your fingerprints. The only problem is that you are not, from many perspectives, quite unique in the way you think you are: Much of the time, your feelings are shared by so many millions of people that you are merely another face in the crowd. Your anger or indignation or gleeful schadenfreude is only one drop in a great countrywide wave of it. Like it or not, you are part of a national mood.
In psychological terms, “mood” is a weather report for your personal emotions, a measure of balmy good cheer or dreary storms. But our emotions, naturally, are influenced by the same winds of change that blow on every other person’s. Certain clouds gather over all our heads — the hardships of a war, or a sudden economic downturn — and dump the same cold rain on everyone. Other days we bear witness to an unexpected act of heroism or a rousing international sports triumph and bask in the same sun. Psychologists have suggested for years that moods are actually contagious, meaning yours are just one part of a vast, dynamic system: We take in what those around us say, absorb the sentiments behind those words and slowly begin mirroring those feelings with our own.
The idea of scientifically measuring such moods traces back at least as far as the 1930s, when George Gallup, the man who would one day be described by Time magazine as the “Babe Ruth of the polling profession,” founded the American Institute of Public Opinion and committed himself to collecting accurate data on the whole nation’s sensibilities, unskewed by the ulterior motives of political parties or interest groups. The institute correctly predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would defeat the Republican challenger Alfred Landon in the 1936 presidential election; just two years after that, it had already begun conducting market research for studios in Hollywood. A new industry — public-opinion data as a valuable commodity, an advance warning of which way the country’s emotional winds were blowing — was off and running.
It was in 1979 that Gallup Inc. introduced its “Mood of the Nation” poll, which asks participants how satisfied they are with the direction of the country. Back then, with the United States mired in gas shortages and inflation, the national mood seemed to be a foul one, scraping as low as 12 percent. A sampling from this year, taken in early June, is positively cheery in comparison, with a robust satisfaction rate of 38 percent. This might seem somewhat meager, but it’s actually America’s highest level of satisfaction since September 2005, soon after Hurricane Katrina, when it registered 39 percent (though some other periods fell within the poll’s margin of error); it reached as high as 46 percent earlier that year, and soared all the way to 70 percent a few months after Sept. 11. By Gallup’s measure, the mood of the country today is worse than it was in the wake of some of the worst disasters in U.S. history, and this is still an improvement over nearly every point in the past 13 years.
It’s the job of politicians and the media’s pundit class to utilize such numbers in the service of advocating and implementing public policy. A Quinnipiac poll in June showed that the family separations stemming from President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy were so resoundingly opposed that, according to NBC News, “it doesn’t take a political scientist to read the current public mood on the topic.” Sometimes hard numbers aren’t even necessary; sheer political instinct will do. John Podhoretz of Commentary, assessing whether Republicans have a chance of holding their congressional advantages in the coming midterms, concluded, without citing any polling data, that voters “will probably be in a much better mood than previous midterm electorates” because of the improving economy.
Whether based on data or on intuition, all these divinations of the national mood are rooted in the idea that the most important parts of our emotional weather are happening outside us as individuals, over our collective heads. We’ll act and think as a kind of hive mind, driving markets and electing officials and erupting in anger en masse, always gathering up into some kind of aggregate emotional register.
In the modern era, you no longer need to ask people how they feel. The collective mood is more pervasive and more obvious than ever. On Twitter and on Facebook, millions of us offer up-to-the-minute updates on our state of mind with essentially no prompting whatsoever. And unlike polls, these weather reports aren’t reduced into yea-or-nay boxes or “disapprove” versus “strongly disapprove” categories. They allow you to be true to your idiosyncratic self. You don’t even have to use words.
In January, Ryan Cummings, then an eighth grader in North Carolina, participated in a cheerleading competition with a group called Cheer Extreme Allstars. At the beginning of her group’s routine, she struck a defiant pose: Her head was cocked, her steely eyes stared unblinkingly forward and her lips were tightly pursed, forming an expression set somewhere between a smirk and a sneer — the sort of withering glare that adults secretly fear whenever walking past a pack of contemptuous teenagers on the street. (“When I made that face,” Cummings would later tell BuzzFeed, “I was just thinking, I really want my team to kill it.”) It’s very unlikely that anyone outside Cheer Extreme Allstars’ immediate sphere would be aware of that face were it not for a single Twitter account, which plucked, from a nearly six-minute YouTube video of the routine, a five-second clip of Cummings and captioned it with two simple words: “big mood.” The resulting tweet has since been liked more than 164,000 times.
“Big mood” (or simply “mood,” if you’re not into hyperbole) has been thriving as social-media slang for years now, usually appearing in tandem with a funny image, video or animated GIF. It’s meant to convey a relatable feeling, with maximum irreverence, as if to say: Here is a visual approximation of my soul right now. The avatars in these images are rarely related to anything about who their posters are; each is just an idealized version of a heightened self, a meme as self-portrait. The “big mood” of an insolent cheerleader can indicate any number of feelings: “I’m awesome,” or “I’m happily deluded about my own awesomeness,” or “I’m trying in spite of everything.” Some moods evoke eternal swagger: News that Rihanna is possibly ending a relationship, or doing virtually anything else, is reliably a big mood. Others signify of-the-moment insouciance: An obscene gesture from Villanelle, one of the protagonists of the popular BBC America series “Killing Eve,” is a big mood. The best ones are outlandish and obscure: An old photo of Carrie Fisher in a trash can, holding a bottle of wine, screams big mood.
It’s that viral tweet about the young cheerleader, though, that has been credited by internet-culture sites like The Daily Dot with finally bringing “big mood” to its mainstream saturation point, making the phrase fair game for use by established media, moderately hip parents and corporate brands. Cummings is a big reason you may have noticed a lot more things being categorized as big moods lately: Blake Lively’s testy encounter with photographers at the Met Gala (as described by E! News), or a Japanese animated series on Netflix (as described by Elle), or a video of two lynxes yelling at each other (as described by Vice), or an important win by the Boston Red Sox (as described by the Boston Red Sox). Nothing is so small or inconsequential that it can’t inspire the internet’s outsize passions.
We would rather our moods be big in this figurative sense (rich, vibrant, specific, intensely personal) than the literal one (collective, shared, part of a system that acts upon us). Social media emboldens this feeling of specialness. Who else but you would think to sum up a personal mood with, say, a photo of an exhausted squirrel, splayed out on a railing outside an office window? But of course hundreds of people recently favorited a tweet doing exactly that, offering replies like “same” and “she is me and I is her.”
There’s no avoiding these emotional contagions. Being inundated with so many moods can affect how we see everything around us, unleashing complex waves of uplift or tumult. If you scan social media these days, it’s hard not to conclude that the overriding sentiments — the inescapable moods that hang over all our heads like stagnant humidity — are those of annoyance, consternation and abstract misery. Not just about the day’s news or the latest grand controversy, but about everything, in general. These feelings can feed into one another, influencing the collective mood as profoundly, and maybe as adversely, as world-historic news events and natural disasters and national humiliations. Take a step back, and you see something like a rat-king of feeling, the biggest mood of all. # # #
[Steven Hyden is the author of Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (2018) as well as Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life (2016). The music critic has written for Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Slate, American Songwriter and Salon as well. Hyden received a BA (journalism) from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.]
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