Boston Terrorized By Cartoons?

We live in a weird world. Yesterday Boston was thrown into tumult by a cartoon ad campaign gone awry. Basically, the cartoon network tried to advertise some of its Adult Swim fare all over the city yesterday, and the effects that were used were bizarre to the point of scaring some people into believing it was some sort of terrorist plot. Globalization being what it is, I first read about the story through a story from a South African news service. But today's Boston Globe not only had an extensive story, it also provided an analysis of how this incident exposed a generation gap in the US and also an editorial about how the city was "paralyzed by a gimmick."

My initial response is simply to pass this off as one of those stories -- a confluence of poor execution, clashing cultures, and all that. But another reality is how we are all so much more attuned, if only selectively so, to terrorism. If a plane goes down our first thougth will be of 9/11. Odd bleeps and bloops emanating from a pecuilar cartoon character in an unexpected place? Terrorism. This makes a certain amount of sense. But when the story turns out to be far more benign, it makes me wonder if we have not created for ourselves a noise-to-signal ratio that only complicates things. And of course the politicization of terror has both cheapened and oversensitized us to the point of an almost universal societal confusion over what terrorism is and as importantly, what it is not.