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Microblogging and Microrage

Maybe it’s due to the heavy rains we’ve had this month, but I’ve been thinking about how socially-transmitted anger, self-righteousness and outrage have gotten to be like cloudbursts: They’re characterized by short periods of intense activity that flare, flood and fade quickly from public consciousness. On the individual level, the issue might culminate in someone joining a Facebook group, posting or forwarding a link, firing off a comment, or signing an e-petition, but then quickly the issue gets overshadowed by the next thing”to come along.

Because they’re enabled by what we used to call microblogging (really, social broadcasting and social status sharing), I’ve been thinking of these episodes as “microrage.”

I don’t have empirical data, so I’m just going by my perception of the rapid fading of some of the more recent socially-transmitted outbursts, like Motrin Moms, AmazonFAIL, and the Domino’s Pizza hoax. Unless you’re a social media or social marketing person, or one of the hardcore offendees still clinging to a boycott, you’ve probably forgotten about them already. (Though, in the case of Domino’s, the ReadWriteWeb article back in April cited a market survey that showed Domino’s was still recovering from the perceptual hit they’d taken. I wonder what more recent data shows.)

Here are a few aspects of microrage:

The Hotter the Flame, the Shorter the Burn
Previous grassroots-driven PR crises (as opposed to authority / media-driven phenomena like the 1982 Tylenol cyanide tamperings) were characterized by longer, slower burns. (With more mellow flavor?) So even though issues took longer to build up momentum, it also meant they were in the public eye and mind for a longer period of time, with more time to propagate, and more time to make an impact (especially as each additional update bumped things up back to the top, to borrow an internet message boards convention). And to steal a metaphor from the epidemiologists (well, from the Pandemic 2 game, anyway), a disease that is too virulent or too deadly to its host can burn out quickly, before it can become widespread among the population.

A Global Village of Outrage
Another factor is geography. Or more precisely, the absence of geography — what might have been merely a local interest story previously (unless it got picked up by a wire service, weird news aggregator, or news gatekeeper) now has the potential to go viral and go global. Essentially, there’s a whole lot more to be outraged about.

However, microrage engages people on a different level — on the surface, the issue engages you, but it’s also  abstracted from you because it’s distant from you (you still care most about the stuff that impacts you directly, which tends to be local to you). Ultimately, unless it goes to one of your core issues, it doesn’t have the same kind of staying power.

(One particular example I was looking at was the “blink-and-you-missed-it” dustup over an unfortunate conflation of headline and content in a Yelp SF anti-rape ad from a few weeks back. It’s not a great example, since it’s more of a navel-gazing, San Francisco / new media gossip story than anything else.)

The Effect of Early Intervention
The last thing that I’ll observe about microrage is that it seems awfully amenable to a good response and good outcomes. I don’t want folks to come away with the impression is that microrage just goes away by itelf. It may be that the thing that keeps the microrage from growing into regular, popular rage, is early warning and prompt response. (Relatively speaking — for example, in AmazonFail, a credible response at the very outset might have prevented the episode from bubbling up into microrage at all.)

However, because microrage is so fickle, anyway, anything seen as a good-faith effort to make things right might be enough to let people check off the box and move on to the next thing.

Anyway, I’m still iterating on the concept of microrage and the role of intervention. If you’ve got a comment on what I’ve put down so far, I’d love to hear it.

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