Facts, Fictions, and How We Talk About the End of the World Online

Discuss.

Fiction

Zombies, zombies, zombies

As you can see, zombies dominate. As a culture, we are obsessed with them.

If we’re not talking about them in The Walking Dead, we’re talking about how we might prepare for a zombie apocalypse and who we’d want on our team of survivors.

If you thought the horror genre had squeezed every last drop of silver screen life out of zombies (pun intended), you might be mistaken. Interest in zombies is still going strong.

Robots

I’m putting both robots and aliens under the fiction banner simply because robot uprisings and alien invasions (for now) reside in the sci-fi genre.

Within the robot conversation, the show Westworld (featuring robotic humans that are, well, very human) as well as Elon Musk (who’s had a lot to say in this area) were both key themes. Meanwhile, I found a lot of debate on whether a ‘robotic apocalypse’ is or isn’t nigh. There’s plenty of content like the following, which ridicules robotic advances.

That said, there’s also a huge amount of fear both around the growing intelligence of machines and their ability to remove the need for humans in different areas of the work force.

Aliens

Moving on to aliens, I was interested to see that conversation around aliens and the apocalypse had the highest proportion of chatter on blogs and forums where there’s a huge amount of discussion around sci-fi.

That said, I chose this tweet to summarize the alien invasion conversation because it leads us nicely into the next section:

Side note: Comets, meteors and asteroids did get a lot of mentions around the end of the world, but not quite enough to get into the top six outlined in this post.

Facts

This section is about conversation that relates more to the real world (as in, there’s not so much chatter about Doctor Who, Westworld, and the Walking Dead).

Nuclear war

The largest spike in general conversation around this was in August 2017, when lots of people were discussing the relationship between America and North Korea.

Numbers have generally dropped more recently, although it remains a pretty consistent topic.

Man-made environmental disaster

This topic has seen a massive boost in the last couple of months, and with so many protests going on around the world it’s really no surprise.

There are many, many aspects to this topic (it could be a blog post in itself) so I’ll save that for another time.

Politics and politicians

In a politically charged environment, I expected political figures and ideologies to make up a chunk of this conversation, but I was surprised by the volume.

Here’s what those conversations look like, visualized using the topic wheel in Brandwatch Analytics.

As you can see, Brexit (specifically a no-deal Brexit) is often discussed in ‘end of the world’ terms.