Outrage Porn: How the Need For ‘Perpetual Indignation’ Manufactures Phony Offense

[closeupready]

This is an interesting op-ed:

Imagine this was your job: you had to wake up every morning, read and watch what was going on in the world, and then, even if you didn’t actually feel this way -- in fact, in spite of the fact that you didn’t feel this way—react with outrage about all of it.

Increasingly, this is the life of the blogger. Despite all the attention and traffic of Upworthy gets for being “positive” these days, outrage and indignation are and always will be pageview magnets. “Outrage porn,” as we’ve come to call it, checks all the boxes of compelling content—it’s high valence, it drives comments, it assuages the ego, projects guilt onto a scapegoat and looks good in your Facebook Feed.

With the exception of Valleywag, very few sites practice the art exclusively but every website, including Betabeat, knows it’s an easy way to get traffic. As Jezebel—a purveyor of the technique themselves—put it, 2013 was the year of “shaming.” Catching someone being racist or homophobic or misogynistic (or more likely, just old and dumb), accusing someone of being unfair, filming a mayor driving over the speed limit, and pointing out privilege are all great things to be outraged by or to “shame” people for. And that’s why they’re staples of the current media scene.
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This is just it. Outrage has slowly eaten online media from the inside out. What was once a righteous and necessary force—a check on softball reporting inside old media—is now a corrupt and lazy vice. The outrage you see isn’t real, it isn’t sincere. In fact, it is the opposite. It’s shallow, it’s superficial and it’s selfish.

http://news.yahoo.com/outrage-porn-perpetual-indignation-manufactures-phony-offense-174916525.html

[Dr Hobbitstein]

1. This just pisses me off!

Down with outrage! We should string up all these outrage peddlers! I'm outraged! Wait. What?

[Quantess]

2. Well, this makes me outraged!

Outrage is being exploited and I'm totally outraged about that.

[sendero]

3. What's sad is that...

.... there are a shitload of things to be legitimately outraged about, but nobody's talking about most of it.

[closeupready]

5. And Ryan makes that point in his op-ed here -

exactly that point.

[upaloopa]

4. Well you'll never see outrage porn here

[closeupready]

6. How fucking DARE you!

[upaloopa]

7. Sorry to cause you such outrage

[Android3.14]

15. Hmmm

If you say so.

[Comrade Grumpy]

8. And DU eats it up.

[hifiguy]

13. With chocolate sauce and nuts on top.

It's one of the staples around here.

[closeupready]

11. OMG yes. And it occurs to me, just now, reflecting on your remark,

that this is part of how much of today's DU - and I'm referring to the same things you probably are - make it resemble a parody of the more colorful side of how boards can be.

When DU was new, it seemed to me to have so much potential; I don't know when exactly it changed, but now, who can take it seriously when every bit of minutiae generates literally hundreds of angry, emotional threads with thousands of high-octane posts each, every month? It really has become a kind of circus rather than a forum.

[Warren DeMontague]

9. gee...

....ya think?

[LittleBlue]

12. Journalism is a joke. It's become social media clerical work.

Huffpo is getting to be bad. I feel like their "someone irrelevant said" articles are actually a template in Word where the writer just fills in the no-name celeb and what he said. Then come the tweets with people replying with outrage (who knows if these people are real or not).

[daredtowork]

14. Easy to call everone else on their cheap outrage

Last edited Mon Feb 23, 2015, 07:05 PM - Edit history (1)

until you are outraged, and you realize your outrage is cheap, too. Twitter made us all armchair Thought Leaders.

Now we just need professional Outrage reviewers to help us figure out what to prioritize.