Outrage is a virus. It infects you. You spread it and infect others. That feeling of outrage is addictive.
Outrage-porn gets viewers aroused. Outrage is a business model.
Social media platforms are advertising platforms. They sell ads alongside websites people visit. You are not the customer. You are the product being sold to the customer, the advertiser.
I have experimented with advertising on Facebook, Google, and KOBI-TV's website. All of them seem to draw attention. Viewership spiked on the KOBI-TV website when there were fires burning locally and people were going online repeatedly to get fire and weather reports. I don't intentionally write things intended to "go viral." A local judge's text messages sparked outrage, and a couple of those posts had big readerships, but it was her texts, not my commentary, that did it. My observation of the variation in the Mail Tribune's subscription pricing went viral, thanks in part to them denouncing me so nicely for writing about them.
I see it directly. Danger gets attention. Actions by judges and newspapers that people find flagrantly wrong--outrageous--draw attention.
Outrage on the Left. Viewership of my blog spiked when I wrote things that people on Bernie Sanders-oriented Facebook groups said was irredeemably disgusting. I had written what I considered neutral things about Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and others.
Bernie's supporters were outraged. How could I be blind to Biden's being a rapist! Do I support his monstrous pedophilia? Buttigieg is a corporate bootlicker, and better to have Trump who is obviously evil rather than Buttigieg who is secretly evil. The Facebook denunciations of me and this blog drove lots of traffic to it. My advertising and blog views demonstrated there were people on the left ready and eager to be outraged at ideological and personal heresy when they saw it, and to tell their friends.
Their outrage involved a secret conspiracy. Many on the left shared the view that Hillary, Buttigieg, Biden, "donors," the DNC, and corporate manipulators all conspired to steal, as in 2016, the nomination from Sanders who absolutely deserved the overwhelming votes of a majority of people, since his policies were so unquestionably widely popular. He could not have received fewer votes. He had to have been robbed. My belief that actually Sanders has a 25-30% niche of support, but not a majority, was proof positive of my corrupt intent. People circulated my blog to be outraged over my wrongheadedness.
Outrage on the right. I am on email chain letter lists from Trump supporters. "Check this out. Interesting. Forwarded message: Better look at it immediately. This probably won't be up for long!"
The videos would disappear because gatekeepers at YouTube and Facebook consider the material factually wrong and dangerous. The videos are preposterous. There are powerful, mysterious villains, and international conspiracies involving tens of thousands of people working in concert, secretly, dark forces of people and Jewish money. My email informants are all old, White, mostly male, people who have time and energy to be hopping mad about how Christianity will be banned and wealth confiscated by the villainous Biden.
Outrage pornography. There is another kind of virus spreader who doesn't categorize as left or right conspiracy believers. These are people who have explored the net and found an area of particular irritation, an itch that needs scratching. Perhaps it is vaccinations, and the person is amazed and angered by the stupidity of people who either don't believe in vaccinations (the idiots!) or who do believe in them (the idiots!) Perhaps it is people who say stupid, racist things while wearing Confederate flag insignia.
Perhaps it is live video of protest incidents, which outrage can go in different directions. A few months ago outrage video circulated of unmarked police officers grabbing and detaining people on the streets, questioning and intimidating them, and then releasing them. Look what Trump is doing! Currently there is circulating a different kind of outrage video: Scenes of White and Black protesters accosting people in their homes and in restaurants, demanding that they demonstrate more visibly their opposition to racism.
Or there is this one:
One way to look at that video is to observe it to be an argument within a demonstration that appears to have dubious purpose. Why are people parading down what appears to be an upscale Portland neighborhood on election night? But we witness some people--White?--shouting at homeowners with Biden signs that peaceful protests are tools of "White supremacy." I consider the comment both incorrect and counterproductive politically. So did, no doubt, whoever posted this on the internet. It was designed to outrage. It could make your blood boil. It has had 67,000 views so far.
The event as shown is fair to put up on the internet. It really happened. It appears to be un-edited, beyond captions to help understand the voices. There is a lot to dislike. The potential danger. The unruliness. The expressed view by somebody that peaceful protests promote White supremacy. The view that a homeowner urging peace is presumptuous.
A video like that could make you want to copy and send the link around to like-minded, or persuadable, friends. The platforms are counting on that. The platforms know who your friends are, they know what material you observe, they know who you forward things to, and they bring you more of it. A video like that is a tiny, unrepresentative piece of reality, but like a sex act or a can of soft drink, it is in fact real. What's the harm if people view and circulate it? Perhaps no more harm than watching lots of pornography or eating junk food, made easy to do because it keeps being sent to you by algorithms that know you have liked it, and might still.
What is this post getting at? A fix on reality in a world of commercialized outrage: Remember, you are not the customer of social media. You are the product being sold. And the platform wants you to be addicted to what they serve you and outrage is addictive. They want you hopping mad.
4 comments:
Hey, buddy, who are you calling OLD? Just kidding. To respond to a column about how folks are getting all riled up and passing on their own preferred flavor of outrage to others, I figure I shall just remain un-riled. And not pass this on to anyone. Thanks, Peter.
Spot on Peter. Many reputable scientific studies show that stimulants like porn, cocaine and sugar produce the same dopamine response to our D2 (pleasure) receptors (just google those search terms and you'll find endless studies). The most consistent theory is that the more you feed the addiction, the smaller the D2 receptors become - which then requires more stimulant to satisfy them. It's neurobiological. In many cases, reducing or eliminating the "stimulant" results in healthy restoration of D2 receptors that produce a "healthy" response when it is presented with those same stimulants.
If you look up "Outrage" and "Addiction"- get ready to spend a few hours of reading. Glen Beck of all people wrote a book about his addition to outrage. One comment in his summary caught my attention "Crisis is caused by chaos". I was thinking if you can create a convincing narrative of chaos (which Trump did in 2016) - you can create sense of crisis which only he could solve. But his technique didn't work in reverse. Covid has been a real crisis but his real chaotic administration made it worse, and the tool of outrage that got him into office, just as easily helped end it.
"tiny, unrepresentative piece of reality"
Yes, one thing I noticed was how the cable networks ramped up the rhetoric as the election grew closer.
One shouldn't forget that the "news" is curated for effect and often lacks context and nuance. Media uses murder and mayhem to sell laundry soap and Toyotas. If advertisers had better ethics we might have higher quality information. I would think you agree that Progressive media tries harder to maintain journalistic standards.
The addiction comparison is apt, and like addiction the dose has to get bigger and the frequency more often to keep the buzz going.
Outrage is an expression of anger at injustice, so whether or not it's justified is the larger question. Abuse of power, I would think, qualifies. It's a bit difficult to quantify exactly but overall my sense is that one side exaggerates and manufactures offenses to a far greater degree, which generates outrage from both sides.
Yikes!
Equal opportunity outrage, if you will...intentional?
Your posts are on a website, and not that much on Facebook or other social media.
I do not see that Facebook is any worse, tho I do believe that the brevity of Twitter causes more dramatic responses.
Bad as it is, I believe that it caused 77 million people to get off their duffs and vote for the right thing.
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