Twitter and Radically Networked Outrage

The concept of Radically Networked Outrage was originally conceived by my Takshashila colleague Pavan Srinath. Having conceived of it, he had promised to blog about it, but it’s been over a month and he’s yet to get down to it. Given this delay, I think I’m justified in stealing this blogpost.

One of the pet themes professed by people at Takshashila, especially Nitin Pai, is the concept of “radically networked societies”. There are too many posts to link to, so I’ll just link to this book chapter that Nitin has written, and to this TEDx talk:

So the whole concept is that societies nowadays are not hierarchical like in the past, but “radically networked”, in that the density of the graph of people in the world has increased significantly with technology. Not only has the density gone up – which means that people are connected to significantly more people than in the past – but technology has enabled people to communicate rapidly.

So you have twitter where you can broadcast your short thoughts. WhatsApp groups enable you to send, and propagate, messages to multiple people at once. This, combined with increased graph density, has resulted in ability for large numbers of people to coordinate and organise, and presents new kinds of governance challenges. For example, it was radically networked societies that resulted in the so-called Arab Spring (which, in hindsight, has mostly led to chaos). Radically networked societies also resulted in the Anna Hazare movement in 2011, which in turn led to the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party, which has taken Delhi by storm.

When societies are so radically networked that they can cause revolutions which can result in the overthrow of governments, they can also such radical networking for lesser causes, such as outraging. When the odd thatha outrages about a certain happening or piece of news, it doesn’t have any impact, and ends up in at best a letter to the editor, and dies a quiet death. If a handful of unconnected thathas outrage about something, it will still not amount to much, and one of their letters to the editor will get published.

However, put together a large number of people densely connected to each other, any outrage in such network will be immediately seen and noticed, and has the potential to go viral. The thing about outrage is positive feedback – when you see someone outraging about a particular topic that you mildly outrage about, you feel encouraged to make your mild outrage public. As the number of people in your network outraging about something increases, the likelihood of you joining in the outrage increases.

So as you can imagine, once there a certain critical mass to outrage about a particular issue, it can go truly viral, until just about everyone is outraging about the topic.

And outrage can have inter-issue positive feedback also. Once you are used to seeing a certain amount of outrage on your twitter timeline, you feel encouraged to make public any marginal outrage about any other issue also. And a number of people getting marginally thus pushed to make their outrage public can result in a further increase in radically network outrage!

We live in a time when societies are radically networked, and outrage is the order of the day. And since outrage causes more outrage, this outrage is unlikely to reduce. It is impossible to say anything remotely controversial on social media nowadays – a pack of outragers will immediately hound you. There are already some victims of such radically networked outrage – like the PR professional Justine Sacco who lost her job after an outraged mob failed to see the humour in her tweet, or scientist James Watson who had to auction his Nobel Prize after outrage about his comments about race had led to speaking assignments dying out, or footballer Ched Evans who is unable to find a club to hire him after doing time for rape. The latest victim of radically networked outrage is Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, who resigned his position as Professor following radically networked outrage about certain remarks he made that were deemed sexist.

And there is no escaping such outrage. In an attempt to escape it, I pruned my Twitter following list a couple of days back, unfollowing people who are highly prone to participate in radically networked outrage. At the end of it, my following list had grown so thin that there was no value for me in Twitter any more. I would just check twitter in the hope of interesting tweets, but come across hardly any tweets.

So today I begin my third sabbatical from Twitter. The first one (January 2014) lasted a month, and the second (August to November 2014) lasted three. I don’t know how long this will last. I’ll be robbed of interesting discussions for sure, but can do without all the negativity prevalent all over my timeline. But I’m sure Radically Networked Outrage will have its way of getting to me again!

In October, during my last sabbatical, I had written about the same topic. And in December, I had written about the “mob courts” of social media.