Our feelings about right and wrong are so immediate, self-activating, and compelling that they influence us as being as (one-sidedly) correct as our perceptions of objects around us. As another year passes off, there linger incessant expressions of outrage that typifies every year.
Digital culture has shaped our mind to an extent that we think being outrage has become our duty, and in the process of fulfilling that duty we often neglect how this outrage has become replaceable and forgettable year after year.
An angry society is not an unhealthy society. Moral outrage, mostly sounded off on Twitter and Facebook, recently proved to be a major force for holding wrongdoers accountable during the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements by democratising and loudening the voices of disempowered sections of people.
Nonetheless, there are fears that social media may be moulding our moral emotions in manners that could ultimately make it tougher for us to reshape society for the better.
In 2014, a study by researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that we were more likely to come to know about immoral acts online than in communication with others in person or through traditional media forms such as newspaper, radio, or TV. The study also underlined that the online content provoked a stronger sense of outrage than immoral acts encountered via traditional media sources or in person.
Social media and online forms of communications often artificially exaggerate our experiences of outrage. Molly J Crockett, an American neuroscientist, in a 2018 opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail, says that 'if moral outrage is a fire, social media is like gasoline.'
As we welcome another year, it's worth reflecting on whether we want to give up the control of our moral emotions and hand it over to social media algorithms that are unconcerned about our own welfare.
