Am I Making You Angry?
Or are you already?
Isaac Gonzalez
It’s no secret that modern social media algorithms are designed to keep users as engaged for as long as possible. Everyone who scrolls, i.e., everyone, is constantly being watched, analyzed, and carefully considered for extreme person-to-person curation in both advertising and every form of entertainment imaginable. Because of this normalization of highly curated algorithms, the ouroboros of content and culture that is endlessly produced and fed to consumers to be spit back out is designed around multiple demographics’ specific “ticks-” the things that spike certain emotions and reactions, be it laughter, happiness, or, more likely, anger.
Ragebait is something that we’ve all become accustomed to, with that being a near-majority of output from creators and accounts, with thousands of content farms and bots, and even more humans. It’s become such a norm to interact with people and begin conversations with acts of hostility that even something like someone sharing a lighthearted anecdote or part of their day is a prompt for inflammatory reactions. It’s impossible to avoid.
In my personal experience, especially in online areas where political opinion is commonly discussed, there are just cascades of endless fighting and infighting that all just become pointless. Uninformed, trivial, all done for the love of the game. It’s downright depressing, enough for me to have eliminated all doomscrolling-based platforms. It’s just continuous, moronic bickering, but where does it all come from?
I think what’s often not examined is why these reactions have become so normalized, why it’s so prevalent in our day-to-day lives. The root of all the anger, if you will. I don’t believe there is one definitive answer, but I do know for a fact who is a part of the problem: You. Us. Everyone who uses social media on a daily basis.
I mention the ouroboros to emphasize the cyclical nature of all content, especially social media. Most people often interact with people and themselves in echo chambers of exclusively what they agree with and feel. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when outside feelings and the need to escape are why most people doomscroll, the level of stimulation given through fast-paced and high-stimuli content heightens pre-existing emotions that we’re trying to leave behind. When we go on social media, we are running from the real world, and in doing so we have such explosive reactions to basically everything; we’re just a shaken soda can waiting to pop.
Anxiety, stress, and sadness are all common emotions that we share on the daily. The issue, however, is how we now deal with them. People are so afraid and annoyed with the idea of confronting personal issues that the path of least resistance is doomscrolling. Better than sitting bored, sitting with ourselves. It’s scary how distant we are from ourselves.
What we must do to take action is remove ourselves and our subscription to the normalization of social media. It’s no secret that they’re designed to essentially melt our brains, anyways. Getting offline, cleansing ourselves, and exploring our inner emotions can ultimately make the self far more gentle. And while it may be less entertaining, it is better for the whole; our whole as humanity, and the whole as in the self. Once we feel better, we can do better.
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