Facebook & The Outrage Machine

I can't BELIEVE something like this would happen in AMERICA!!!!

WHERE HAVE ALL THE REAL MEN GONE!!???

Proof that all politicians are SLIME and a giant BOIL on the face of humanity!!

Sound familiar? 

Welcome to the outrage machine. The only rule of the outrage machine: Be angry. Very, very angry.

And there's a lot to be angry about, in this world. Just look at the news: rape, murder, genocide, natural disaster, child neglect and abuse, and on and on. Too many terrible things, too few Twitter characters to contain them all.

Outrage is often the best response--or if not the best, then the most instinctive.

That being said, I'm taking a step back and looking at outrage from several different angles.

Outrage as drug

The dirty little secret about outrage is that it feels good. It feels right. It feels righteous.

Surely righteous anger has been the catalyst for many courageous and revolutionary movements throughout history.

Anger can rouse us from depression, from angst, from feeling like a victim, from passivity, from fear.

But what if it becomes a drug? What if outrage forges familiar neural pathways that we revisit over and over and over again?

Outrage as manipulation

A lot of the outrage on facebook (or other forms of social media) is manipulative, flat out. That doesn't make it right or wrong, but it does make it too easy--

Too easy to go to that place of outrage, to the chest-heaving, eye-dilating, fist-clenching, teeth-gritting, heart-racing automatic and autonomic response.

Some of us have that one facebook friend who functions as our own personal outrage machine. I used to have one of those. Then I blocked their feed. It was that simple. I had so much free time on my hands I took up knitting AND making pie crust from scratch. I was a much more peaceful person (not really).

It seems easy to acknowledge that certain status updates, links, articles, blog posts, etc. are specifically designed to elicit outrage. They manipulate our emotions to get a certain kind of response.

Outrage as money

It's weird to think of outrage as dollars and cents, but that's exactly what it is in click-baity journalism. Just think about it. Someone is manipulating one of your most powerful emotions to make money. [Oh wait, that's all advertising.] And again, this doesn't make outrage right or wrong. I would, however, question the motives of those peddling outrage for profit.

Outrage as narrative

Here's where it gets interesting (for me).

I'm worried that as outrage becomes a default response, we will begin to tune out the things that don't push our own personal outrage buttons. If it doesn't match our own particular "narrative of outrage," it doesn't register.

I'm concerned that many outrage narratives foster an "Us v. Them" mentality, not necessarily an "Us v. Rapists" mentality (Note: Rape = Bad) but an "Us v. Small Town Football" or "Us v. Republicans" or "Us v. The Idiots Who Voted for Obama."

There simply isn't enough outrage to go around. Even I, a feminist, have a limited supply (And I eat outrage for breakfast, like cheerios).

And the not-so-shocking truth about racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or many other social evils is that in real life, they're depressingly banal and hardly outrageous enough to earn a stint on Jerry Springer, let alone 45,634 shares on facebook.

"And now for a very controversial after school special wherein Connie's coworker rolls his eyes condescendingly when she offers to help him create a PDF in Microsoft Word."

Oh the humanity.

I'm more interested in the ordinary, the blase, the familiar and unquestioned. I want to interrogate the logic of sexism, of racism, of all kinds of violence and prejudice. 

I think there are "good" people who believe some pretty messed up things. I think there are good people who participate in and perpetuate a culture that I don't believe in, a culture that (honestly), I hate. To state it more blatantly, there are people that I like, people that I love or would have loved had I known them, who participate(d) in and perpetuate(d) a culture that I hate. 

And the "Us v. Them" binary starts to crumble.

So, to recap, the downsides of outrage:

• Outrage puts you in "fight or flight." [Which can be useful if you need to fight!]
• Repeatedly posting outrage click-bait might cause people to start tuning you out (or blocking your fb feed).
• Outrage creates "buttons," not stories. 
• Outrage is where nuance and subtlety go to die. 
• Outrage is exhausting

Humor as an alternative to outrage

I'm not saying that the opposite of outrage is bland amusement, or that rape jokes are always the best response to rape (although rape jokes can be one of the most subversive responses to rape culture, and no, "I'm going to rape you right now! Hahahahahaha" is not a subversive rape joke, or much of a joke, for that matter).

I'm saying that humor can accomplish what outrage cannot. It can turn things on their heads. It can offer a fresh perspective. It can tilt the world just enough that you see a piece of the sky that you've never seen before. It can feel like hope.

Which is perhaps a post for another time.