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Shootings and searches (prasad)

I had a vague sense that the Aurora movie theater shooting last month became a much larger story than the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting last Sunday. Google trends thinks the same thing, going by search volumes for Aurora and Sikh over the past month. (I pasted the Google Trends volumes first for the US, then for India, then for the world)

Aurora_us
1. Within the US, the peak interest in the Batman shooting was several times higher than that for the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting, and the interest was a lot slower to die away.
1.1 Aurora beat Sikh in every state, Wisconsin being the only one where Sikh came close.
1.2 There seems to be an English/Spanish difference – searches in Spanish were basically entirely uninterested in the Gurudwara case (changing the query to ‘sij’ changes nothing, except that no one on the English site was searching for it!).

Sikh_india
2. In India, Sikh beat Aurora, though not by a very large amount, once you subtract out the high base rate of Sikh which has nothing to do with the Wisconsin attack.
2.1 Within India the pattern is as expected – Punjab, Haryana and Delhi were wildly less interested in Aurora (though I wasn’t able to see the graphs for Indian states separately – maybe that difference comes in part from the base rate, and not from the shooting peak.)
2.2 The further south you go the more the relative interest in Aurora increases over Sikh and both Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were actually rather more interested in Aurora than in Sikh.

Aurora_world
3. The worldwide trend tracked the US one, with Aurora beating Sikh in every country except India. Google doesn’t think it has enough search volume to give results for Pakistan. The more Anglophone countries showed some degree of interest in Sikh. Many of the country level graphs just look like noise, so I suspect neither of these was a big story (or these weren’t good keywords) in many countries.

Possibly pertinent thoughts:
A. Generically, people care more about those who’re like them. Basically the queries are compatible with what seems intuitively evident – Indian Sikhs see themselves as having more in common with American Sikhs than American non-Sikhs do.
B. In principle one should normalize, since Aurora killed more people. I wouldn’t know how, since in practice I doubt people have linear responses in search interest versus number of deaths.
C. The Aurora story had legs, since the guy was caught, then dyed his hair, went to court etc. And he booby-trapped his house. Plus he chose his site well, since everyone watching the Batman movie would find out about the story and get interested. Basically inasmuch as he was looking for attention, he did a good job. The Gurudwara guy instead killed himself like an idiot. Let this be a lesson to us all – suicide is never the answer.
D. The Aurora shooter is inscrutable since at least so far it’s hard to figure out what he was thinking or what went wrong. Whether your particular hobby horse is mental health, or the anomie and isolation characteristic of technological life, or the fate of the losers of sexual revolution, or bullying, there’s ample fodder for speculation. By contrast, the logic of the Gurudwara shooter was apparent from the start. What’s inexplicable attracts more search queries.

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6 responses to “Shootings and searches (prasad)”

  1. Ruchira

    True, the Aurora story had legs in the beginning because as you point out, an inscrutable young killer with dyed orange hair and sleepy bugged out eyes causing mayhem at a midnight movie show is more fascinating than a garden variety racist. But the media outlets in print and on the tubes are staying with the less intriguing Sikh Temple killings story quite steadfastly. Perhaps they see it as a civil rights (and public service on their part) issue in an election year where the race of one of the presidential candidates is a crucial factor in deciding how some people will vote.
    Att. General Eric Holder attended a condolence meeting in Wisconsin today and besides calling the act hate crime, he did not flinch from using the “t” word.

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  2. prasad

    On reflection, ‘sikh’ is an absolutely horrible query for India. I don’t think anyone in India would look for info on this using that keyword. As it happens, ‘gurudwara’ gives the same result, without the high base sikh has.
    http://www.google.com/trends/?q=aurora,gurudwara&ctab=0&geo=in&geor=all&date=mtd&sort=0

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  3. Norman Costa

    @ prasad,
    Thanks. I’ve never seen these Google graphs before. Very interesting.
    My sense is that the murders of the Sikhs does not portend a danger for the rest of us, while the Aurora murders show that no one is safe. Also, we want to hear from, and about, the shooter. Is the Aurora shooter’s story a complicated one, or bizarre, or maybe even interesting? So far, it’s going to be complex and way interesting. The shooter of the Sikhs can’t tell us anything. He was a White supremacist who hates. Nothing is less complicated or less interesting.

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  4. Ruchira

    Ex-Sepia Mutiny blogger and professor of political science at Notre Dame, Naunihal Singh has this piece in the New Yorker.
    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/an-american-tragedy.html

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  5. prasad

    Ruchira,
    That’s a nice article (there’s a but coming!). It’s the post I started out wanting to write, if you remember from my email a week (?) back. Though I do say Naunihal Singh writes it really well, rather more eloquently and incisively than I would have at any rate. There’s clearly a sense in which an American (un-subscripted, un-hypenated) is presumptively white, Christian, rural/suburban and so on. The stereotypical American is way more Republican than the average American is, so to speak. Even more so, there’s clearly a global news-sense that a human being is white and western by default. Aurora-scale stories are global news iff they happen in the west. For every other category of person they matter to the directly affected group, but attenuate rather more quickly with geographic or cultural distance.
    I decided not to write that post (well, besides the fact that it’d have taken time, and isn’t the kind of writing I do decently :) ) because in a sense that post itself has a liberal (post)Christian, highly educated, largely white target. It’s something that should be part of the conversation, and which frankly a New Yorker reader quite wants to be reading about, but it’s rather pro forma in terms of content. I’ve seen and heard that many times before, and while it impinges upon me, I couldn’t really make myself do that whine. Which again isn’t to say it’s inaccurate, since I’d probably agree with every fact in the New Yorker article, and certainly share its ideals. But (in terms of familial, cultural, educational or economic resources) I’d have to be in the global top few percent, and comfortably above even the American mean, at least in terms of expected life outcomes. It’s not a whine -I- can produce with high fidelity.
    So. Clearly Americans as a whole cared more about Aurora than Oak Creek. But I saw search volumes showed clearly that there’s at least modest interest in the latter among English speakers. Spanish language searchers didn’t care much at all. Naunihal Singh can’t do a Kanye West on the New Yorker, telling them that Hispanics don’t care for Sikh people (which wouldn’t be a sensible assessment anyway). But it sure seems like an important tidbit to have in mind, especially if you have a fuzzy rainbow coalition in mind – the sensitivity-trained audience of that article is the one that needed it least. You might almost say, Latinos have actual problems to worry about, going beyond self-esteem and consciousness-raising.
    And I’m sure factors like the ‘defaultness’ of certain people help explain why South Indians in India cared more about Aurora than about Indian or PIO Sikhs , but given especially the white supremacist angle, I rather suspect the bigger part of the story is simply that Aurora had greater masala content by far. Plus who’re we kidding anyway – of course that brave sixty year old granthi had more in common with Indian Sikhs and Punjabis than he did with his corn-fed neighbors. His kids and especially grandkids won’t, and will probably be brown-white like East Asians (whether that’s good or bad) but it takes time. In most non-anglo countries it wouldn’t be possible at all.

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  6. prasad

    fwiw, but going in a different direction, I’ll also recommend the Robert Wright blog post (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/aurora-vs-oak-creek-misallocated-fears/260807/) linked to from the New Yorker article. The “actual” (as opposed to popcorn) significance of an Aurora type crazy-guy shooting, seems rather more limited than that of this type of racially or religiously motivated terrorism. [Well, mental health is a huge issue, but should be seen as such regardless of low probability events like a shooting somewhere]

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