Always On: The Internet As Our New Court

Historically, there was a locale that those with wealth, power, and fame would congregate and be seen – the court. The court was a treacherous place for many because it could cause one to lose favor or standing but it could also garnish one’s reputation as being something more. One’s reputation could be etched into many people’s minds as a true master of wit or a charlatan. The internet has become the court of fools and a public space in which we display our mastery over it.

The court had several key limitations: locale, size, and the “banana phone” problem. The locale would limit the story’s reverberations by reducing how far and wide the story of greatness or preposterous in nature would travel. The fall of historic Empires and the rising of their borders insured that the limitation would be relegated to certain locales. Size specifies how many people could witness this person’s behavior in the court. The act of physically fitting in a space limits the ability for one’s story to directly impact people. Lastly, the “banana phone” problem wherein one person who may have witnessed someone’s actions/speech may embellish or downplay the occurrence. This miscommunication alters the worthiness of how the world is going to perceive the person. The process of mythmaking begins in the eyes of others and ends in the ears of others.

Now to modernity, seeking “virality” or the generation of memes has enabled a praise far louder than what was previously capable. The concept of memes comes from the Greek term, memetic or duplication. This concept was originally attributed to ideas that were easily transmitted to other people and would “latch” into their thinking process. This has generated into a field of study, Memetics, which seeks to study the traits by which information spreads. It has prompted a huge group of individuals debating over the sociological elements but I am seeking to discuss the impact on public perception.

Now that the internet has pervaded into almost every facet of our lives it has generated a new court and proceeded to intensify the memetic rate. This court eliminates some of the restrictions that previously existed. For instance, the locale has expanded to a digital terrain that only has bounds in the technology. No longer are words limited to the walls of a building. There are billions of people with access to the internet and are not restrained to the confines of the small physical court. Surprisingly, the “banana phone” problem or the misinterpretation problem does still exist. Often people can skew the information provided to suit their beliefs or agenda.

Regardless, let’s talk about the how the internet has promoted a new court. Those who maintain a savvy grasp and a penchant for wit will reap a strange world of internet prestige. There are generally two types of internet prestige: “shit-posting” and persuasion. The former seems to focus on the power of the internet to generate hilarity. The latter is a focus on presenting the facts in a way that that pulls others towards a cause. In the recent months, we have seen the utter failure of one group, NRA empowered individuals, and the mastery of the court by the Parkland shooting survivors.

The NRA has attempted to declare war against these students in various ways. By going on Fox News and speaking out at their own convention in order to say that mental health is the main cause for gun violence – particularly school shooting. Then came the generation of the internet to prove that the ability to “shit-post” and be politically persuasive don’t have to be separated. They drew everything up from main NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesche’s past where she sold bizarre beet infused supplements to pointing out the hypocrisy of the NRA convention being a gun free zone.

The NRA did not have a good showing in response. It has been mostly threats and tired talking points while the spotlight and favor of the court remains heavily with the youth. There is a mastery found in the young that has been lost by other groups. The NRA was already struggling with gaining the favor of the internet by making terrifying videos about how the “media” and Black Lives Matter movement was going to essentially kill your entire family. Between that they made some wonderful videos that are laughable about “liberal” media – including one where the NRA spokesman puts WHOLE lemons into a blender to make lemonade. Whole lemons. Rinds on and all.

The youth have successfully managed to pull the court out into the world. Recently, they had die-ins at Publix because Publix provided a donation to a pro-NRA representative that caused Publix to withhold giving any further donations. I believe their mastery of the court will only lead to more outward political actions. Though since the court can be fickle, we will see if it continues to translate to a success. Also, if the NRA does learn to use the internet better, they may gain some appeal. They are very far behind and one slip-up leads to backward trending for all involved. I can’t help but want them to fail. Their history from a small gun safety group to outright lobbyists of Death should be highlighted over and over again. With the adeptness of the youth, there is a good chance that they live a long time with the knowing glares warranted for jesters.

 

 

How is the Internet Changing Moral Outrage?

We don’t need a social scientist to tell us that there’s something different about moral outrage when it’s expressed online. We can see for ourselves that it’s more prevalent, more intense, and often more destructive.

Just how and why the internet and digital media are transforming the way we express outrage is a more interesting question. And in her article “Moral Outrage in the Digital Age,” published last fall in Nature Human Behavior, psychologist Molly Crockett gives some preliminary answers.

Psychological Framework for Expression of Moral Outrage

Crockett begins by providing a basic psychological framework for understanding the expression of moral outrage. First, moral norm violations are the stimuli that evoke moral outrage – an emotional reaction. Second, there are responses to the outrage-provoking stimuli: the subjective experience of moral outrage, along with other factors, motivates one to express the moral outrage through gossip, shaming, or punishment. Finally, there are the outcomes of moral outrage expression – the costs and benefits for both the individual and for society.

Adapted from Figure 1 in Crockett’s article

Using this framework and existing research on moral outrage, Crockett takes a look at how digital media platforms may be promoting the expression of moral outrage and modifying both the subjective experience of it and the personal and social outcomes associated with it.

Stimuli That Trigger Moral Outrage

Digital media changes both the prevalence and nature of the stimuli that trigger moral outrage, Crockett argues. People experience moral outrage when they witness norms being violated, but encountering norm violations in person is rare. One study found that less than 5% of peoples’ daily experiences involve directly witnessing or experiencing immoral behavior. On the internet, however, people learn about numerous immoral acts, much more, in fact, than they do in person or from traditional media.

In the pre-internet age, Crockett says, the function of gossip was to spread news within one’s local social network to communicate who could be trusted. The reason for sharing information about immoral acts was, therefore, to reinforce trust and cooperation within the community. But digital platforms have changed the incentives for sharing such information. “Because they compete for our attention to generate advertising revenue,” Crockett argues, “their algorithms promote content that is most likely to be shared, regardless of whether it benefits those who share it – or is even true.”

Crockett also points to research on virality showing that people are more likely to share morally laden content that provokes outrage. Because such content generates more revenue via viral sharing, she argues, “natural selection-like forces may favour ‘supernormal’ stimuli that trigger much stronger outrage responses than do transgressions we typically encounter in everyday life.”

Responses to Outrage-Provoking Stimuli

Crockett argues that digital media may be changing the way we experience moral outrage. One possibility is that the constant exposure to outrageous content causes “outrage fatigue”: it could be diminishing the overall intensity of the outrage experience, or causing people to be more selective in their outrage to reduce emotional and attentional demands. On the other hand, she says, research has shown that expressing anger leads to more anger, which could mean the ease with which people express outrage online could lead to more subsequent outrage. More research is needed in this area, she says.

Besides changing our experiences of outrage, Crockett says online platforms make expressing outrage online more convenient and less risky. Expressing moral outrage offline requires effort, if only because the outraged person must be within the physical proximity of his target. “Since the tools for easily and quickly expressing outrage online are literally at our fingertips,” Crocket argues, “a person’s threshold for expressing outrage is probably lower online than offline.”

Crockett also suggests that the design of most digital media platforms encourages the habitual expression of outrage. Offline, she says, the stimuli that provoke outrage and the way people respond depend on the context. Social media platforms, on the other hand, streamline outrage-provoking stimuli and the available responses into a “stimulus-response-outcomes” architecture that is consistent across situations: “Clickbait headlines are presented alongside highly distinctive visual icons that allow people to express outrage at the tap of the finger.”

Furthermore, Crockett says, positive feedback for outrage in the form of “likes” and “shares” is delivered at unpredictable intervals, a good reinforcement schedule for promoting habit formation. And so, “just as a habitual snacker eats without feeling hunger, a habitual online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outrage.”

Personal and Social Outcomes of Expressing Outrage

Expressing moral outrage offline carries a risk of retaliation. But online platforms limit this risk, Crockett says, because people tend to affiliate mostly with audiences with whom they agree and where the chance of backlash is relatively low. Moreover, online platforms allow people to hide in online crowds. And as Crockett puts it, “Shaming a stranger on a deserted street is far riskier than joining a Twitter mob of thousands.”

Empathic distress is another cost of outrage expression. Punishing and shaming other human beings means inflicting harm on them, and this is unpleasant for most people. Online platforms reduce this unpleasantness, Crockett argues, because it hides the suffering of real people behind their two-dimensional online icons. “It’s a lot easier to shame an avatar than someone whose face you can see,” she says.

Online platforms alter not only the personal costs of outrage expression but the rewards as well. When people express moral outrage, they signal their moral quality to others and, thus, reap rewards to their reputation. And given that people are more likely to punish when others are watching, these reputational rewards are at least part of the motivation for expressing outrage. Online platforms amplify the reputational benefits. “While offline punishment signals your virtue only to whoever might be watching,” Crocketts says, “doing so online instantly advertises your character to your entire social network and beyond.”

Expressing moral outrage benefits society by negatively sanctioning immoral behavior and signaling to others that such behavior is unacceptable. Crockett argues, however, that online platforms may limit these and other social benefits in four ways. First, because online networks are ideologically segregated, the targets of outrage, and like-minded others, are unlikely to receive messages that could induce them to change their behavior. Second, because digital media has lowered the threshold for outrage expression, it may reduce the utility of outrage in distinguishing the “truly heinous from the merely disagreeable.” Third, expressing outrage online might make people less likely to meaningfully engage in social causes.

Finally, online outrage expression likely contributes to the deepening social divides we have been witnessing. Based on research suggesting that a desire to punish others makes them seem less human, Crockett speculates that if digital platforms exacerbate moral outrage, in doing so they may increase polarization by further dehumanizing the targets of outrage. Noting the rapid acceleration of polarization in the United States, Crockett warns that if digital media accelerates it even further, “we ignore it at our peril.”

What Next?

At the dawn of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his personal challenge this year is to fix Facebook. “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

It’s still unclear what Facebook will look like at the end of the year, but Zuckerberg’s first step is to fix the News Feed so that users will see more posts from friends and fewer, but higher quality, articles from media organizations. These changes may well be for the better, but if Zuckerberg truly wants to make sure that time spent on Facebook is well spent, he might heed Crockett’s call for more research on digital media and moral outrage.

As Crockett points out, much of the data necessary to do such research isn’t publicly available. “These data can and should be used to understand how new technologies might transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self-destruction,” she says.

If Zuckerberg answers the call, maybe other platforms will follow, and maybe the internet will be a more enjoyable place.