Middle-market tabloids Daily Mail and Daily Express would run letters with a moany tone starting "Why oh why do we always..." while the downmarket tabloids letters columns would typically be pithy observations or tips delivered in short, punchy paragraphs that probably came from no further away than the subs' desk. Letters that were violently abusive, boring, over-long or plain mad would end up on the spike at every newspaper's office - there's no space for bad letters.
But the internet changed all that. Everyone's voice can be heard. Anyone with an opinion can shout. And be heard - not by millions, but by dozens, hundreds, thousands. And because many authors seek to be popular with a given audience of like-minded people, they aim to give that audience what it wants. And outrage - along with humour - are what grabs people's attention. [Read this excellent Economist briefing about how the attention economy driven by the social media has distorted democracy.] Outrage is being used to manipulate voters; set up story that people are likely to feel outraged about and link it to a forthcoming election. Or referendum. Fake news of the outrage-generating type has been deployed in the UK, US, France and Germany.
Humour is tricky to get right; good comedians are always in short supply. Outrage is easier to manufacture. Take the photo, below. A sign outside a retro PRL-themed bar in Poznań, styled after a Czarny Punkt (Accident Black Spot) sign, commonly seen on Poland's roads.
On the real thing, the number on the left is the number killed, the number on the right, the number injured. Here, it gives the number satisfied/happy, and the number sober. At first sight, a rather amusing take on an (all-too) familiar road sign... but could it cause outrage? Outrage to those who've lost loved ones to drunk drivers? I'm minded here of this weekend's horrific accident in which a drunken driver in a BMW, driving his pals home after a boozy night, lost control of the car; it smashed into a barrier and burst into flames. Everyone got out and fled the scene, except the eighth passenger - locked in the boot - who burnt to death.
Making any kind of link between alcohol and driving is... outrageous? Or, in this case - humorous?
It took me a while, for my first reaction was to laugh. It did strike me as funny.
I consider myself eminently fortunate in that I never lived under communism. That would have caused me to have felt genuinely outraged on a daily basis, seeing my petty freedoms taken away, seeing my human potential wasted by a stupid, brutal system - outrageous. People living under Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe would be right to feel outraged. Or citizens of Maduro's Venezuela. But we, in our safe European homes, with only limited emotional energy, comfortable and relatively (in historic and global terms) prosperous, have little to be outraged about in our day-to-day lives. In mine? Neighbours heating their houses by burning crap that poisons our air, drivers tearing down local roads far too quickly, aggressive dogs and people dumping household rubbish by the wayside.
These things affect me directly, on a personal, emotional level. But if someone were to say: "vote to leave the EU and these four things would be put right," I'd laugh at them. Some things are more fundamental than others. The most fundamental is the road from the bestial towards the angelic, from barbarism towards ever-higher civilisation, from aggression to kindness. We would all do well to address our feelings of outrage we come to feel when engaging with the social media.
This time two years ago:
My mother's funeral
This time three years ago:
Poland Works! revisited
This time five years ago:
Kraków-Warsaw by train
This time seven years ago:
Warsaw Blogmeet
This time eight years ago:
My fixie reconfigured
This time ten years ago:
Not In My Back Yard
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