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Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.
On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.
Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.
In this scenario, “Bob” is a hypothetical guy who believes that a woman has cut in front of him in line at the supermarket checkout. He and the woman get into a brief shouting match before she informs Bob that she’d just ducked out of her spot in the line to replace a carton of eggs that turned out to be cracked. He apologizes, and that’s the end of it—except someone recorded the incident on their smartphone, then uploaded only the shouting match, reading all kinds of deplorable motives into it. “The video need only include a hint of cultural asymmetry,” Rose-Stockwell writes:
It may be seen as an angry outburst by a man (Bob) toward a woman (the other shopper). Or a Democrat (Bob) toward a Republican (the lady). Or any heightened reflection of their implied group identity. It can be repackaged as an example of a troubling trend in society. People who feel this way who see the clip now have an opportunity to explain exactly why it’s offensive. They can link it to a larger narrative that may have nothing to do with the actual event itself.
That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.”
This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.
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Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.
This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.