Numb by Charles R. Chaffin

Author:Charles R. Chaffin [Chaffin, Charles R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119774488
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Outrage Machine

“Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy.”

— Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric

Garrison is an IT manager for a small government contractor and works from home. He spends about three hours per day on social media. Each day, he posts multiple times on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you want to get the latest news, he is the source. It may be a biased source, but he is current with breaking news from both trustworthy and perhaps not‐so‐trustworthy sources. Most of his posts are political in nature, arguing about both policies as well as moral and religious issues with friends and complete strangers. It seems as if every time I see him, he has blocked a relative over some heated argument. (I guess they unblock each other after they cool down a bit and the cycle continues.) When I ask him why he continually participates in these arguments, he says, “I just can't let it go. They are so wrong in what they are saying and believing and it just bothers me to a point that I need to respond.”

I often wonder if people really think that all of this time arguing on social media is really serving them. Once in a while I have discussed certain topics on social media and never during any of them has anyone ever said, “That is a really good point. I never thought of it that way. I am glad we had this dialogue.” In the spirit of full disclosure, I have never said that to anyone else either. We just seem so pissed off all the time, and it is something different each day and perhaps every hour. Twitter is always “blowing up” in response to what someone said or some terrible slight at an awards show or something even more trivial! People regularly take to social media to voice their outrage. Once the responses start pouring it, let the games begin. The feud is on, whether between the right and the left, the sports fans wearing green versus those in purple, right‐handed people versus left‐handed, whatever. Incidentally, researchers in Australia found that the angriest tweets tend to come on Mondays (not a surprise) and as weather gets colder, the tweets also tend to get meaner. Combine a gaffe on a reality television show with a cold Monday and you have the components for a high‐powered outrage machine.

The Urban Dictionary describes outrage culture as “When people play the victim card and bend over backwards to be as offended as possible when they really aren't.” Tim Kreider of the New York Times first penned the term in 2009, stating, “It seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.

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