I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).