I'm going to use the adjective "flammable" now to describe people who can be easily riled up into political rage. It's great because it emphasizes that not only is there a match, there's tinder.
Agreed! I feel like it is also a good term for a psychologically disarming recognition. I am flammable about certain topics, and having that word now makes it easier for me recognize my flammability (and hopefully tone it way down), if that makes sense.
It's also great in that the same piece of wood can be more or less flammable given environment. Social media is a like change in climatic conditions leading to less rain and more evaporation.
> It's also great in that the same piece of wood can be more or less flammable given environment.
imo, it is not just the wood, but the environment too, which matters perhaps more:
>> But there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the specific ways that Facebook and YouTube corral our attention. The patterns, by now, are well known. As Buzzfeed famously reported in November 2016, "top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined."
>> Humans are a social species, equipped with few defenses against the natural world beyond our ability to acquire knowledge and stay in groups that work together. We are particularly susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging, and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies. These kinds of messages are to human community what salt, sugar, and fat are to the human appetite. And Facebook gorges us on them...
>> The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
I agree. It's a great metaphor. I'm also going to start using flamebait more frequently, where previously I just lumped it under the more generic "clickbait" (a flamebait headline is a clickbait headline but a clickbait headline is not a flamebait headline).
It's actually quite a modern idea that instead of controlling your own response to someone, you are better off responding as poorly as possible and blaming the person who you're responding to "for making you do it".
It's not good. Any gamers here will be familiar with the new "tilt" slang and how it actually places the blame on anyone but the person doing the wrong deed.
I do not enjoy this new world of blaming imaginary catalysts instead of blaming bad actors.
> It's actually quite a modern idea that instead of controlling your own response to someone, you are better off responding as poorly as possible and blaming the person who you're responding to "for making you do it".
I disagree. Almost no human behaviors are "modern" -- sometimes frustratingly so.
Historically, authorities would often blame those they subjugated for "making them" do something (monarchs, jailers, armies, etc.) It's also a very common model of spousal abuse.
In general, it's easier to blame someone else when you overreact than to face your own mistakes and apologize. I don't know any reason modern society would have invented that. The impulse to shift blame is intrinsic to having the human set of emotions.
Nope. There's a difference between having the power to rewrite an idea and actually appealing to others to follow suit.
In one case the other is rewriting what happened, the other is claiming that what happened was done only for the reason of _____.
I don't know any logical reasons why someone would invent this. I know a fair few illogical ones. We don't really live in a logical world, constantly inventing idiocy.
