The Guardian on faux rage

This is essentially the Guardian's version of that other article about social media being so much faux rage. Ignore the headline, it's useless.

There is a through-line to these spurts of emotion we get from spectatorship: the subject matter is not important. It could be human rights abuse or a party-wall dispute; it does not matter, so long as it delivers a shot of righteous anger. Bile connects each issue. We see rage and we meet it with our own, always wanting more.

...There are elements of the human emotional journey that are novel and are driven by modern conditions. Aaron Balick, a psychotherapist and the author of a perceptive and surprisingly readable academic account, The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, says: “I think for sure anger is more expressed. What you see of it is a consequence of emotional contagion, which I think social media is partly responsible for. There’s an anger-bandwagon effect: someone expresses it and this drives someone else to express it as well.” Psychologically speaking, the important thing is not the emotion, but what you do with it; whether you vent, process or suppress it.

“A hysterical emotional response is when you’re having too much emotion, because you’re not in touch with the foundational feeling. An example would be office bitching. Everybody in the office is bitching and it becomes a hysterical negativity that never treats itself; nobody is taking it forwards.” This has the hammer thud of deep truth. I have worked in only a couple of offices, but there was always a gentle hubbub of whinging, in which important and intimate connections were forged by shared grievance, but it was underpinned by a deliberate relinquishing of power. You complained exactly because you did not intend to address the grievance meaningfully.

Social media has given us a way to transmute that anger from the workplace – which often we do not have the power to change – to every other area of life. You can go on Mumsnet to get angry with other people’s lazy husbands and interfering mother-in-laws; Twitter to find comradeship in fury about politics and punctuation; Facebook for rage-offs about people who shouted at a baby on a train or left their dog in a hot car. These social forums “enable hysterical contagion”, says Balick, but that does not mean it is always unproductive. The example he uses of a groundswell of infectious anger that became a movement is the Arab spring, but you could point to petitions websites such as 38 Degrees and Avaaz or crowdfunded justice projects. Most broad, collaborative calls for change begin with a story that enrages people.

[See, the thing about complaining is that it can be a genuinely effective way of coping with pressure. Keeping things bottled up is not healthy, but being told to keep them bottled up when you need to vent is even worse. There are a great many faux-rage discussions on social media that would be absolutely fine in the real world, i.e. between relevant colleagues, but are absolutely useless when talking to a wider audience. Sometimes a good rant about some personal issue does you good, especially on smaller social media where you're never likely to attract anyone outside your social circle anyway. You'll get your sympathy, feel better, and move on. The problems start when it reaches a wider audience who see it as all part of the downfall of civilisation or whatnot, and take the damn thing far more seriously than they ought to : instead of sympathy you get a call to righteous anger to fix something which is apparently now a major problem in society.]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/16/living-in-an-age-of-anger-50-year-rage-cycle?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other