Years ago I started labeling the “crisis of the moment” as Outrage Porn.
Outrage, self explanatory.
Porn, because studies show its addicting.
It’s similar to the old media trope, if it bleeds, it leads.
Regardless of time frame, media broadcasts the worst of the news at the top of the hour, as the lead story, to draw in the audience. There was a time when reporting was, generally, a good faith effort without bias unless is was clearly labeled as opinion or editorial.
Then everything changed.
News corporations started taking sides promoting, prodding and coddling their base with useless adverbs and inappropriately used nouns to create unneccesary divisiveness. Far left. Alt right. Marxist. Nazi. Patriot. Communist. Capitalist. Socialist. Conservative. Liberal, etc.
Words lost meaning and turned into a war cry for a population of people who, which I will never comprehend, are afraid of the letters that form words into sentences and paragraphs.
This phenomenon has no socio, economic or education boundary. Anecdotally, from my observations, it is the affluent, (over) educated, and overly socialized whom are most absorbed and embrace this new (chaotic) normal.
With the bastardization of language, it is no longer acceptable to claim one sees both sides of a discussion. Nuance no longer exists. You are either with us or against us. Even worse, silence is violence somehow became a thing.
This culmination of events, I akin to a downward spiral and race to the bottom, is further exacerbated by the Twitter acquisition.
Even the most carefully curated Twitter lists eventually gets populated with the unintended, undesirable, and unexpected.
I, for one, am enjoying not only the vitriolic outrage from people less successful than Elon, but also these new surprises in my DMs.
