Curated Peace, Mediatized Crisis: How Content Conditions Us
From Stillness to Reckoning
How busy and tiring has the news cycle been these days! I sometimes want to avoid social media altogether, yet I still find myself drawn back.
Sometimes, I use meditation apps to escape the chaos. A carefully arranged atmosphere: soft tones blending together, slow-moving animations, and nature sounds in the background. Everything is designed to slow down time and create a refuge from the daily noise.
After completing my meditation session, I feel an urge to check my notifications. This habit leads me straight into the news cycle. Bold headlines flash on screens, red banners signal urgency, and voices speak in clipped, rapid tones. The contrast between platforms is striking: the meditation app promises balance, while the others — X, Instagram, etc. — feel momentary and exhausting.
In a world saturated with digital content, aesthetics do more than appeal to our senses; they shape how we interact with reality. Digital platforms with calmer designs and the political mediascape that is constantly forcing urgency — what happens when these two aesthetic worlds collide? And, most importantly, does the way we experience these aesthetics desensitize us to the realities they seek to influence?
A World Curated for Calmness
Meditation apps, wellness influencers, and self-care brands use carefully composed imagery to create a sense of stability. As I discussed in a previous post, colors are muted or washed in pastels; animations move in fluid loops, and fonts are unobtrusive. Even sound is part of this aesthetic — whispered narrations, ocean waves, and the gentle hum of a synth pad.
This aesthetic is not just about relaxation; it’s about reassurance; the visual language of digital wellness is rooted in control. It tells the viewer that the world can be managed, that chaos can be subdued with the right tools, and that stillness is always within reach. Yet this retreat from the world also fosters detachment. Wellness culture often prioritizes personal peace over external realities and “digital detox.” The message is clear: step away from the noise, find your center, and disengage. But does disengagement come at a cost?
A World Built to Shock
Wellness culture presents a soother experience, and political culture stimulates, demanding emotional and intellectual engagement. Today, political media — news channels, campaign ads, and social media accounts on X, TikTok, and Youtube— thrive at an accelerated pace, framing everything as immediate and inescapable to hold our attention and designed to provoke.
- Bold, high-contrast typography: Political media frequently uses bold, high-contrast fonts (often in red or black, all caps, thick strokes) to emphasize urgency and importance.
- Fast-paced editing mirrors the speed of unfolding events. When breaking news segments are considered, there is a jump between multiple live feeds, quickly cycling through expert opinions, interviews, and on-the-ground footage. TikTok and Twitter/X especially amplify this effect by providing media recording and editing features, and the algorithms circulate the posts. Clips of protests, political speeches, and police encounters spread in seconds and are edited for maximum impact.
- Sound & Sensory Manipulation: Disruptive sound design — alarms, sirens, tense music — creates an emotional response to the viewer. The
dramatic orchestral builds, heartbeat sounds, or ominous bass notes instill fear or urgency. The deep, foreboding voiceovers with suspenseful music add to the tension. - Curated Imagery: Protest footage, disaster zones, and war coverage often appear in their rawest form or deliberately use dramatic or drastic footage, heightening emotional impact. This can serve various purposes, such as raising awareness, mobilizing action, or sensationalizing events for engagement. For instance, the 2023 Israel-Gaza conflict was extensively documented through unfiltered social media footage. Similarly, news outlets often select the most intense visuals — destroyed buildings, devastated children, or chaotic scenes of explosions — to drive home the urgency of a crisis.
These sensory design techniques are effective because they trigger psychological responses, such as fight-or-flight instincts, fear, outrage, or urgency. However, overexposure to this style of media can lead to desensitization.
Crises feel hyper-visible and strangely routine when every issue is presented as an emergency. This causes emotional fatigue, which makes real engagement more difficult. As a result, we scroll past suffering, bombarded by one catastrophe after another, until nothing shocks us anymore. The line between engagement and numbness has
become thinner.
When Calmness and Crisis Collide
We are witnessing a convergence of these aesthetic modes. News organizations are increasingly adopting calming visual elements—softer colors, slower animations, conversational narrators—to prevent audience burnout.
Social media accelerates this blending. Instagram carousels on major social issues, like the war in Ukraine or the overturning of Roe v. Wade, often package political turmoil in aesthetically pleasing, digestible texts — minimalist layouts, clean typography, and muted colors.
Similarly, The New York Times’ interactive graphics present complex crises — climate disasters, political conflicts — through fluid animations, scroll-based storytelling, and refined visuals. This enhances engagement but also alters the emotional experience of news, making crises feel immersive, structured, and even visually pleasing. If a humanitarian disaster is presented in pastels, does it feel as dire?
Meanwhile, wellness brands borrow the aesthetics of crisis, urging users to “take action,” “reclaim their peace,” and “fight burnout” as if stillness itself were a battle.
Several meditation apps now integrate news content, claiming to offer a “balanced approach” to staying informed while protecting mental well-being. Headspace and Calm, on their Instagram pages, provide news updates alongside mindful exercises, mirroring the breaking news alerts of media apps but framed as self-care. Even these wellness platforms use urgency — pop-up screens, countdown timers, and notifications — to keep users engaged.
- Push Notifications: The meditation apps use notifications to remind users to stay consistent — “Don’t miss your daily moment of peace 🌿 Your mind will thank you later. Keep your streak going!” This taps into the fear of losing progress and encourages consistency while framing the meditation practice as something essential for self-improvement.
- Subscription Pop-ups: These are often designed to interrupt the user experience with urgent language — “Don’t Miss Out!” or “Stay Informed!” — encouraging immediate action.
- Countdown Timers & Limited-Time Offers: Many apps and websites use countdowns to create a sense of scarcity. Wellness platforms might restrict access to certain articles, guided sessions or courses behind paywalls with a limited-time free trial message.
This blending of aesthetics combines engagement and anxiety, making even calm-inducing apps part of an attention economy that thrives on urgency.
The Aestheticized Reality
When soothing or alarming design choices are used, they condition our reactions, making us focus on the feeling they evoke rather than engaging deeply with the real issue. Whether it’s a calming design that diminishes urgency or an alarming notification that raises the stakes, the deeper meaning or substance risks getting lost in the packaging. This leads to superficial engagement instead of a thoughtful, more profound response to the core message.
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes explains this shift. Our realities are constructed through hypermediation, where digital media shapes not just what we know but how we feel. Political upheaval and self-care coexist in curated online spaces, blurring activism with lifestyle and reducing urgent issues to emotionally digestible content. The same platforms that promote mindfulness also direct us to take an action that defined by these platforms, leaving us to question: Are we informed, or are we being pacified?
Balancing Awareness and Action
Media aesthetics serve both cultural anxieties and market logic, keeping users engaged through fear or comfort. The emotional labor of activism leads to fatigue, prompting a retreat into curated calmness.
As we navigate a media landscape shaped by opposing forces — urgency and stillness, crisis and calm — we must ask ourselves: How do we engage meaningfully without becoming overwhelmed? Awareness alone is not enough. Recognizing the power of aesthetics in shaping our perceptions allows us to question what is being mediated and why.
The challenge is not to reject either mode entirely but to remain critically aware of how it shapes our emotions, attention, and actions. In an era where everything is designed to influence how we feel, real engagement requires more than reaction — it demands reflection.
Yet disengagement is a privilege — who gets to look away?
