Media Invasion

I'm frequently mystified by how some of us react to certain news articles about things which have almost no importance.

I'm never sure though if the outrage is real or just the reaction of a small number of "influencers" on social media.

We used to cite the adage that everyone was going to get 15 minutes of fame.  I think the question now is can people get 15 minutes of privacy?

What is even more troubling is how many people react so strongly to how they perceive other people's behavior.  If you draw the ire of the social media crowd, you are likely to be harassed and possibly threatened beyond your ability to withstand it.  Further, via all sorts of apps that help identify you, this harassment may jump from the virtual world to the real world.

It has always been a feature of the internet that the privacy emboldened some to say things they wouldn't dare say to your face.  It was a place that encouraged the worst of human behavior, but in those early days it was confined to the "nerd" crowd and went unnoticed by most.

Now of course social media is everywhere and many news stories I read cite reaction on one of them as some sort of indicator.

Of course we do also like our polls.

Still on any given day we can get all the outrage we need simply by reading trending events on our favorite social media site.  A lot of the outrage is about things we never would have even heard about in the past.

Progress?