I don’t think that outrage is different from contempt in terms of being a free hit of righteous moral superiority. Outrage may create more motivation to do something, but that “something” will be biased towards protest and/or punishment, not actual problem-solving… and in the case of online media, the protest and/or punishment is likely to take the form of more posting to the same media outlet. So the optimally addictive mix would need both outrage and contempt. Too little contempt, and pure outrage would be exhausting. Too little outrage, and not enough people post vs. read.
For me, the optimum solution to these problems is to avoid as much as possible any media streams that are consolidated by Big Social. For example, I never, ever, ever look at my Facebook account’s main page, or look at my notifications. Instead, I browse things I want to browse in their own little information silos. (That is, specific groups or pages.) RSS feeds are helpful tools for this, which is why RSS is so largely dead.
The problem with Big Social isn’t that you end up with filter bubbles, it’s that Big Social tries to consolidate things in such a way as to control your information consumption priorities, while pushing “discovery” of things you didn’t actually want or need to know… like Twitter randomly showing me stuff from people followed by people I follow, or stuff that people I follow liked or replied to.
I don’t think that outrage is different from contempt in terms of being a free hit of righteous moral superiority. Outrage may create more motivation to do something, but that “something” will be biased towards protest and/or punishment, not actual problem-solving… and in the case of online media, the protest and/or punishment is likely to take the form of more posting to the same media outlet. So the optimally addictive mix would need both outrage and contempt. Too little contempt, and pure outrage would be exhausting. Too little outrage, and not enough people post vs. read.
For me, the optimum solution to these problems is to avoid as much as possible any media streams that are consolidated by Big Social. For example, I never, ever, ever look at my Facebook account’s main page, or look at my notifications. Instead, I browse things I want to browse in their own little information silos. (That is, specific groups or pages.) RSS feeds are helpful tools for this, which is why RSS is so largely dead.
The problem with Big Social isn’t that you end up with filter bubbles, it’s that Big Social tries to consolidate things in such a way as to control your information consumption priorities, while pushing “discovery” of things you didn’t actually want or need to know… like Twitter randomly showing me stuff from people followed by people I follow, or stuff that people I follow liked or replied to.