9 ms·

Sorry but this is dumb. Outrage culture, like the weaponisation of the abortion, drug and gun debates, has been going on since _at least_ the sixties. I mean, l

• bamboozled 9y ago
  The author points out that it's different this time because you're not getting a more balanced perspective which you would've received from traditional media outlets and from interacting with other members of the public through face to face communication and potential confrontation. This is because social media companies have a vested interest in showing you things you only want to see to get you hooked on the site so they can make more money. Then you share more outrageous things because you get a hit of dopamine when another like minded person shares or agrees with your outrageous perspectives.
  • fao_ 9y ago
    > a more balanced perspective which you would've received from traditional media outlets Are you serious? Traditional media outlets have always been run by the landed gentry (or their capitalist equivalents), and so have almost always reflected the ideas of the existing system.
    • cristianpascu 9y ago
      It's slightly harder to fill a whole newspaper page with non-nuanced text than it is to fill a tweet.
      • moomin 9y ago
        Yet somehow the Daily Mail manages it every single day.
      • GuB-42 9y ago
        Filling a whole paper is harder than writing a tweet, sure, but nuance has nothing to do with it. It is very common to see an entire page of arguments all pointing in the same direction. It can be even worse because it allows for a sneaky progression from well accepted facts to whatever bullshit they want you to believe. For example a tweet may go "Chlorinated water kills thousands of people every year". An full article may start with actual scientific research about how chlorine can kill, then talk about some specific group of people who don't drink chlorine water and are healthy, follow up by talking about some people making profit off water chlorination, throw in some stories about decadent billionaires and then deliver the final message. Nothing about that is nuanced.
    • nabla9 9y ago
      > almost always reflected the ideas of the existing system. The existing system has reflected the liberal democratic ideas (ideals in plural).
      • fao_ 9y ago
        Really? I look at the everyday newspapers, and I see even the "left wing, unauthoritarian" news papers preaching xenophobia, ignorance, and bad science. None of which are present within traditional academic "left-wing liberal" thought, with writers such as Rosenburg and Chomsky. Part of this is that the Overton Window has shifted so far right that "left wing" in the mainstream now means "center", however it cannot be ignored that what the mainstream considers 'normal' has indeed been shifted over time by the editors (and through them, the owners) of the newspapers. I think for me the most startling revelation recently was that what I considered to be a traditionally marxist perspective and given right, "The freedom from want", was adopted by western countries during World War Two. It's a damn shame that although it is a founding right, it, and efforts to implement it, have been for decades ignored and disparaged within the media and within "right-wing" academic circles.
        • mistermann 9y ago
          > the Overton Window has shifted so far right that "left wing" in the mainstream now means "center" As a conservative, I'd claim the window has shifted in the other direction, at least in some respects. Are you able to give any examples that you see as evidence of a broad shift to the right?
          • HillaryBriss 9y ago
            maybe i'm misperceiving this, but it seems that the left's criticism of US military action has diminished or been muted. in the 60's people on the left literally criticized US soldiers as they returned to the US from Vietnam. (the phrase "baby killers" comes to mind). you don't hear that sort of thing today. criticizing US soldiers is just not done. even Barbara Boxer touted her work with the "Wounded Warriors" project. Al Franken went on USO tours. it's just not ok to criticize US soldiers. on the contrary, we thank them for their service and try not to call into question what happened "over there." furthermore, when GW Bush argued for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, an awful lot of Democratic politicians got on board and voted to authorize it. i think they were afraid not to authorize it. later, drone attacks carried out by the Obama administration were more or less accepted too.
    • bamboozled 9y ago
      Don't shoot the messenger. I was just stating what I read from the article. While I understand what you're implying, I think it's wrong to assume every single media outlet is bias.
• hliyan 9y ago
  > What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice There's a lot of truth here. Same goes for the perception that social media has made us "dumb" -- it's just that now we're hearing from a lot of people who simply did not have a public voice before. That said, I think instant access to social media is eroding our impulse control abilities. We're able to act our emotions before they have a had a chance to simmer down. Maybe a lot of the outrage we're hearing is heat-of-the-moment comments that the commenters don't hold as long term views?
  • ci5er 9y ago
    To clarify, you are saying 'the Internet didn't make us dumb, but now the dumbest of us now have equal access to a microphone'. Is that a correct reading of you? If so, that's interesting. Because of feedback loops at multiple levels... Your last sentence is interesting. You appear to be saying that people might not believe the stuff spewing from their very own fingertips...
    • nathanaldensr 9y ago
      ...people might not believe the stuff spewing from their very own fingertips... They don't. Only hyperbolic writing and videos get attention nowadays. Everyone's trying to one-up everyone else in the attention wars. Virtue signaling abounds. Calmly stating a reasoned opinion is a quick way to be ignored.
  • exodust 9y ago
    It's more likely they don't hold as long term the rage and emotion they initially punched out their views with, rather than the views themselves.
• jwilk 9y ago
  Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Rock_Desegregation_1957.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Rock_Desegregation...
• mseebach 9y ago
  You seem to have read a different article than the one linked here. The first few paragraphs specifically addresses the concerns in your first paragraph, and I feel that the rest of the article sympathises strongly with your second paragraph, lamenting not the expedience of those voices, but their risk of drowning in poorly directed outrage.
• humanrebar 9y ago
  Since you bring up abortion, drugs, and gun laws, I think a lot of the blame goes to the erosion of federalism in the U.S. It used to be more possible to roll your eyes and walk away when people from California or Texas (or wherever) passed ludicrous or outrageous laws. Making everything a single national issue actually ratchets up the conflict, especially in a country as diverse as the United States. There is some hope, though, in that at least the drug laws seem to be moving back to a state-level issues (depending on what the Attorney General can get away with).
  • macspoofing 9y ago
    And that corresponds to using the supreme Court to legislate. Much easier to convince 9 lawyers than thousands of fellow citizens and representatives.
    • Y_Y 9y ago
      You only have to convince five! And you're right, that doesn't seem too difficult. Getting the supreme court to unanimously agree on something would be a miracle.
      • SllX 9y ago
        Before you can convince even Five though, you have to have a case strong enough to bring to court in a court system that by design is reactive (contrast: proactive) to changes in the law. You then need to make it through any number of courts (local, State appeals, State Supreme, Federal district, Federal appeals, and finally SCOTUS), and then, if you make it that far, you have to hope SCOTUS decides to actually take your case on rather than kick the can back down to a lower court. At any part of the process, litigation can come to an end if the parties involved decide to settle or if one of the parties chooses to stop fighting it. This is actually one of the ways the more controversial parts of US law have been in force for so long, either nobody has standing to bring a lawsuit, or if they do, the US Department of Justice will sometimes rather choose to stop litigating than potentially lose one of their more powerful legal instruments or reveal too much information about how they gathered evidence for a case in the first place.
• rdlecler1 9y ago
  While it’s true now that cameras don’t seem to be reducing police shootings (needs citation) I suspect it may lead to better behavior. Similarly, social media also drives a amplifying feedback loop that you’re not factoring into your analogy.
• macspoofing 9y ago
  There's something special about social media driven outrage. You just need a few tens of people to get offended for it to be national news.
  • w_t_payne 9y ago
    We are constantly sampling outliers. We need some way of getting real polling data into the hands of the public so we don't get diverted by the most vocal minority.
• chapill 9y ago
  >What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice. Not really. Those voices are shadow banned at -15 karma. Social media ensures you hear the voices you want to hear.
• kelukelugames 9y ago
  Would you argue that dumping tea into the harbor is an act of outrage?
  • cryoshon 9y ago
    if only we had so simple and effective of a way to express outrage as dumping tea. the question is, what is the 21st century version of dumping tea into the harbor? we are long overdue.
    • jerkstate 9y ago
      One could say that electing an unqualified reality TV star as president was one way of expressing outrage at the status quo. It's all a matter of perspective.
      • api 9y ago
        I spoke to several people during the election who expressed this sentiment. One said they hoped he would do "as much damage as possible." It was definitely a FU vote to many people. Unfortunately the establishment has not gotten the message so I fear it will escalate.
        • krapp 9y ago
          >Unfortunately the establishment has not gotten the message so I fear it will escalate. What message? Impotent rage against "the establishment" isn't a message, it has no goal but catharsis. People who elected Trump because they wanted to see damage to the system are getting it. Trump has humiliated the US, disgraced the office, made himself a laughingstock to the entire world and destroyed the world's confidence in us as a superpower. They get to see him rage at liberals and leftists and judges and the intelligence community and vent his spleen at everything Fox News told him was terrible with the world that particular night. But what else did they expect? They elected a man who was not competent, who didn't necessarily share their beliefs, and who was no less an establishment figure (in being a globalist billionaire rich old white man) than anyone else. Did they think having this bull break some china in the Oval Office would lead to anarchy? Dissolution of the Union? what? And what would they escalate to? A literal ass? Those Trump voters are getting what they wanted... monocles have dropped and pearls have been clutched and lulz have been had. I don't understand why they wouldn't be happy. If they wanted their particular grievances against the system remedied, they would have elected someone capable of doing so. But they only wanted to see an old man piss the rug on the White House, so... fine.
• psyc 9y ago
  Five short years ago, I was no less a permanent resident of the Internet than I am now, and I was no stranger to the unsavory dark corners. Yet I had either never, or very rarely encountered so many of the inflammatory topics that i see now on a daily basis. There were no regular references to nazis (godwin'd threads aside) and white supremacy. You don't even hear about godwin's law anymore, because it applies much too often now. I'd never heard of antifa. I didn't daily encounter people accusing people and things of being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on. I didn't know the names of any white supremacists other than David Duke, and I rarely saw anything about him. (Ironically, I still have never seen any white supremacist material or figures in any organic context. I only see them being promoted by their opponents due to the Streisand Effect). My perception of all of this has changed drastically in the last 5 years. I encounter all of the above daily to the point where it's never far from my thoughts. That was never the case before. I'm not an activist. I don't take an interest in politics. I only subscribe to graphics programmers on Twitter, and I only visit subreddits that interest me. But it's only in the past 3-4 years that I can't even be on the web without seeing all of the above. Now all of this hasn't found its way into IRL, yet. But it has begun to. People I've known for many years have recently started posting about what I consider fairly extreme political ideas. Certain distinctive vocabulary, and the associated thinking, is seeping into their lexicons. I'm sure there's a lot of truth to what you're saying too. But culture spreads. If those outraged voices are "just" being heard more, there is no "just" about it. They're drawing people in, the ideas are spreading, and the mobs are growing too.
  • adventured 9y ago
    I didn't know how many of my second-tier friends, and friend-acquaintances, were assholes, belligerent politically, and or just downright mean when it comes to things they disagree with (small or large). It's a very odd thing to be exposed to so many of a distant person's thoughts on so many topics over years of time. I think part of the aspect of Facebook sucking so bad now, is that people have become 'friends' with vast numbers of people that they really are not in fact friends with, and never would be. Previously they would have remained unexposed to all the things they don't like about said persons. Now that exposure is a daily event, and it makes a product like Facebook horrible, because it sinks to being a shit-show 24/7, where your thousand 'friends' on a network like that end up overwhelming the less than 20 or 50 people you'd ever care to communicate with regularly. What's the subtractive value of being exposed to one terrible post by an acquaintance 'friend' on Facebook? How many good posts does it take by your actual friends on there, to offset that negative? I'd bet it doesn't take being exposed to very many personally negative posts in a day to drop the Facebook experience into the sewer. Fundamentally, I think this means that the hyper-connection experiment known as Facebook is doomed to fail (ie be a miserable product), unless you heavily restrict it down to a small core socially that you actually get exposed to. And then if you do that, is there any point to having the thousand 'friends' on your fake friends list to begin with (I'd say no).
• Grue3 9y ago
  Before social media, it was much harder to find a group of people who have exactly your brand of crazy, and form an outrage mob. Now you can easily find your fellow Nazis, Communists or whatever, and make a big stink about anything.
• Angostura 9y ago
  I'm sure you're not claiming that society is no more polarised today than it was 30 years ago - but that's what it appears you're claiming. If you agree that polarisation has become more extreme, then no, it's not 'dumb'
• gkya 9y ago
  > What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice. And that's the important thing. They have a huge voice now, given the loudest and most repetitive people get way more presence, and how social networks are malleable to bots. Saying this existed decades ago is like comparing nuclear weapons to arrows and bows and saying lethal weapons existed since time immemorial.
  • sizzle 9y ago
    Great analogy. Would like to see the OP refute this or reconsider his position.
  • kelukelugames 9y ago
    It's hard to say they have a huge voice. Perhaps louder than we are used too. At the end of the day, Trump is still President and the Republicans run both the House and the Senate.
    • gkya 9y ago
      That's because they knew how to surf the huge voices that we did not hear until recently. That's happening all 'round the globe.
      • kelukelugames 9y ago
        I have no idea what surf the voices mean. Or voices that we did not hear until recently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        • gkya 9y ago
          I meant how misinformation and provocation is used to generate confusion and support. Voices we did not hear until recently should be clear: many niche groups, good or bad, that was unknown to the general public until the advent of the social media.
• fullshark 9y ago
  > I mean, look at this picture and tell me how social media’s made this worse: Before you had to get up, go somewhere and protest to get noticed. A lot of people agreed with those students that desegregating was outrageous but only the people in the immediate area / willing to travel got noticed/heard. The costs of expressing moral outrage were much larger. Now I can sit on my toilet and express moral outrage about Mozilla's CEO giving money to anti-gay marriage groups or whatever and be seen/heard by the entire world instantly. Thus the volume of moral outrage has been turned up big time. Which was the point of the piece you just dismissed offhand as dumb: "If moral outrage is a fire, is the internet like gasoline?"
• sizzle 9y ago
  There's something to be said about the ubiquitous nature of hd video capturing phones today with the ability to live stream/instant upload (police) shootings in all their gory detail to the masses. This is outrage in an IV drip connected to your veins.