This week Nature published an article discussing the relationship of social media with sexism in science. But the most interesting part was actually an aside looking at the social media controversy about the ESA guy wearing a shirt covered in a comic-book styled women. The key things to note is that the actual "storm" kicked off after he publicly apologized and that only ~20% of people using the #shirtstom and #shirtgate hash-tags were women! In contrast #scishirt hashtag which was a positive response to the controversy was 67% women. All of which suggests at least 50% (probably more given the long delay compared to the popularity of the broadcast) of the outrage was actually anti-outrage outrage, ie people getting outraged at the fact that some women were offended by the shirt.
Similarly, there have been many recent articles complaining that trigger warnings are destroying university education, preventing people with psychological issues from getting better, or turning students into coddled arseholes. This despite the fact that in all the examples these articles cite of students asking for trigger warnings are individual students (and in some cases dozens of students opposed the complaint). That's a handful of students across the roughly 20 million currently attending higher education in the US who are making unreasonable requests for trigger warnings. Yet there are dozens of people amongst my extended social network who are outraged about this "outrage".
Most recently is the Starbucks plain red Christmas cup, where a single video of someone complaining about it has sparked a massive anti-outrage outrage which has even extended to a notable late-night talkshow host despite the fact that almost nobody is actually upset about it. Yet again the anti-outrage outrage is by far outstripping the actual outrage.
So in that light I hope this blog can start yet another twitter storm/social media anti-anti-outrage outrage, so that the cycle can continue until everyone is completely incensed at all times about nothing at all.
