Every time we glance at our phones or check our social media, we
are met by irate tweets and rage-inducing headlines. Why are we
all so furious, and is the always-on culture making us angrier?
byAMY FLEMING
WHY ARE WE SO ANGRY? FE ATURE
utrage has become the defining
emotion of the 21st Century,
worn righteously, as a finger-
pointing badge of honour. From
the backlash against Yorkshire Tea,
when Conservative politician Rishi
Sunak was photographed with a packet
of it in February this year, to the outrage
from both sides over Brexit, the Twitter
hordes are waiting, spring-loaded, to call
out anyone who is ideologically opposed
to them. Anger is being baited, owned and
exalted like never before.
No matter where you stand on each
individual case, the outrage and the
hungry baying for blood – often with scant
attention being paid to context, and with
no compassion for someone who may have
made a mistake in 280 characters or less- has become a disturbing phenomenon.
Sitting anonymously on a bus, anyone with
O
a smartphone has the power to bully, hurl
abuse, humiliate and belittle. So is this
knee-jerk anger and polarising aggression
in danger of seeping out from beyond our
screens and into real, flesh-and-blood life?
Or, perhaps more disturbingly, are online
platforms merely holding a mirror to what
was already there?HOT UNDER THE COLLAR
It’s hard to scientifically measure whether
we’re getting angrier or simply venting more
publicly. The latest Gallup Global Emotions
Report is based on 151,000 interviews with
people in 140 countries. Since it began in
2016, the report has found that the number
of respondents who felt angry has risen, with
the global average currently sitting at 22 per
cent. (Anger in war-torn regions is double
that, with 43 per cent of people in Palestine
and 44 per cent of people in Iraq feeling
angry.) However, what psychotherapist
and author Dr Aaron Balick can say with
confidence is that, in the internet age, “the
capacity for emotional contagion of anger
has increased, certainly you see anger
crossing populations much more easily.”
For example, assaults on Transport for
London employees have risen by nearly
25 per cent in the past three years, from
505 to 628, while the RAC’s 2019 Motoring
Report found that 3 out of 10 drivers had
witnessed physical abuse on the roads
in the previous year, with the number of
people whose single biggest fear was the
aggressive behaviour from other drivers 2“THE OUTRAGE AND THE HUNGRY
BAYING FOR BLOOD – OFTEN WITH
SCANT ATTENTION TO CONTEXT – HAS
BECOME A DISTURBING PHENOMENON”
GETTY IMAGES/MAGIC TORCH