Jason figured out something about the “rage blogging” trope.
The really interesting thing is, the people complaining about “rage bloggers” and “drama” are doing the exact same thing as the bloggers they complain about, by pointing to things they disagree with and disagreeing with them. Publicly. Calling them out on things they disagree with, even while they themselves decry the “call-out culture” of disagreeing with people publicly.
Well yes.
Actually the people doing that fit the description much better than we do, because they’re the ones who spend literally hours on Twitter or that unsavory forum every day tap tap tapping about nothing but a small handful of bloggers. That’s the only subject of their rage-tweeting and rage-forum posting.
Anyway, yes.
It’s like Diane and Elan, in a way. On the one hand, some crabby entitled behavior in reaction to a delayed flight, which ended. On the other hand, a sustained campaign to punish the crabby entitled behavior, which still hasn’t ended.
Which is the rage, who is the rager?
Another undercurrent running through this is “emotions are bad.” Your blog posts are “rage blogging,” mine are cool, dispassionate logical dismantling of your posts. A lot of the Diane/Elan arguments seem to imply that Diane is awful because she lost control of her emotions, while Elan’s behavior was all for the lulz and therefore awesome. Elan himself went from obsessively tweeting about, writing notes to, and confronting Diane to mocking anyone on Twitter who disagreed with him as being “enraged.”
It’s hardly limited to this issue, of course. The standard victory cry of the internet troll is to say “ha ha, I got you all upset about this!” People who criticize you are just “haters.” Idiots click on numerous links and sometimes create new usernames just to let everyone know that this topic is unimportant and silly and therefore you all are the losers for writing blog posts and comments about it. A common flamewar tactic is to declare that the other person is obvious angry and upset, while you, of course, are merely amused by the whole thing. It’s also a common trope wheeled out by the prudes who are offended by profanity: you shouldn’t say “fuck” because it sounds like you’re angry!
Because, you know, caring about shit is just so lame.
OT (except for the rage theme): Gator fans joking about rape should be ashamed.
And now I see that my overly long comment on an earlier post probably fits better here. Ah, well. There’s a common narrative thread. 🙂
Dickens and now Yeats. This is the way to go!
Yes, well, and heaven forbid you use a foul word or something whilst disagreeing with the cupcake du jour, or you’ll also be accused of being ‘angry’ and ‘taking things too personally’. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that in online discussions, usually like tone trolling to ignore the actual points.
This reminds me of a Mitch Hedburg bit: “I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it!”