Dodging a Bullet to the Head
I spent most of my time as a 30-year-old preparing for the Y2K bug. I was then living in a lay Catholic community that believed heavily in end-time prophecies. As the turn of the millennium approached, nations were concerned that computer programs had been using a two-digit code for the year — 99 instead of 1999 — and would put the world in chaos when 2000 would be interpreted as 1900. Doomsday Preppers wasn’t yet a show then, but we could have been on its first episode.
Families in our community bought tracts of farmland in a nearby province outside Metro Manila, thinking that the Y2K bug would throw us back to the agricultural age. We shifted to cars with diesel engines so we could hoard diesel fuel. The latter is less flammable than gasoline and we stored them in drums in our basement. We also had a bodega in our center stocked with toiletries — sanitary napkins, toilet paper, soaps, etc. Our Bible study tackled apocalyptic topics week after week.
You could say we looked like crazy religious fanatics, but we did all that with the backdrop of countries spending $300 billion to make computer systems Y2K-compliant.
When the year 2000 rolled in with nary a glitch, skeptics said Y2K was a big hoax. And yes, I did feel a bit foolish for all that preparation for nothing. Were we victims of the millennium’s biggest fake news? Did the world succumb to the magic bullet theory of media effects propounded by mass communication studies?
The magic bullet or hypodermic needle theory proposes that the message fired by the “media gun” goes straight into the audience’s head “that would immediately, powerfully, directly and uniformly cause them to adopt a new idea or attitude” (Rosenberry and Vicker, 2017). We now know that many factors contribute to the impact of media on its audience, but when you look at how fake news proliferates today, you wonder if the magic bullet is still the operative norm.
Early on in the pandemic, viral videos about bananas preventing COVID made the fruit sell briskly in markets in the Philippines. Mainstream media would soon expose this as false.
The COVID-19 vaccine has also been surrounded by tons of fake news, increasing vaccine hesitancy and polarizing people. Some reasons why people don’t want to take the jab sound as far-fetched as the Y2K bug, but when microbiologists and scientific experts give well researched and scholarly arguments against the vaccine, it will make you think if there really is a conspiracy you’re missing.
With so much sensationalized and even outright false information going around at the speed of light, the responsible communicator in me vets everything, especially before I forward anything. I’d like to believe that I’m less vulnerable to media influence because I investigate things before I believe in them.
Looking back to twenty years ago, could I have dodged the Y2K bullet that made me a doomsday prepper knowing the things I know now? Maybe. But one thing’s for sure. The world wouldn’t be where it is today if programmers didn’t fix the bug then.