It’s official. The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year. Actually they are two words. Rage bait. Surely it should be one word. Doesn’t ragebait look more digital? Ragebait has been described as the evil twin of click bait. As you surf the net, or a million and one social media platforms, something catches your eye that is going to put up your blood pressure. The curious thing is that, knowing that something is about to make you very angry, nonetheless you click on the link. Of course, ragebait works. You do click on the link. That is the reason why ragebait is word of the year. All the clicks have been counted, and cannot be ignored.
Although it’s a phenomenon of the digital word, there is really nothing new about ragebait. For as long as newspapers have existed, sub-editors have conjured provocative headlines to draw your attention to something that is bound to cause outrage, to make you splutter into your cornflakes. What that outrage might be depends upon the political leanings of the newspaper, and its readership. Single mum on benefits has twelfth baby. Buckingham Palace pays less council tax than 20 Old Kent Road. The headlines resonate around, but do not cross between two disconnected echo chambers.
There are other manifestations of rage. Now that we have moved into the season of Advent, we may shortly expect to see trolley rage in the supermarket. To anybody who has lived for the last couple of years in the Gaza Strip, trolley rage must seem absolutely inexplicable. Then there is road rage. Every motor vehicle is fitted with a horn, a means of drawing attention to one’s presence, and to a potential hazard. But car horns are usually sounded, often protractedly, in order to express outrage at another driver’s perceived infringement, real or imagined. Sometimes the driver under attack responds with an equally prolonged blast of his own horn (the driver is usually male), and suddenly we are in the midst of a contretemps, as unseemly as the spectacle of two men brawling in the street. The other day I saw a guy being tail-gated by a horn-blasting Audi around the skirts of Stirling Castle. He was so irritated that he slammed his brakes on, causing the Audi to crash into his rear bumper. Two men emerged from their respective cars, but I didn’t hang around to observe the outcome.
I’m not sure where to find my car horn on my Skoda Enyaq. Somewhere on the steering column. I really must find out. But I’ve never had cause to use it. Temperamentally, I like to think I incline more towards placidity than rage. But I don’t fool myself. I too get tail-gated, through our village’s 20 mph zone, and sometimes feel inclined to stop dead, get out and take a baseball bat to the Audi’s windscreen. It could all turn on a dime. There but for the grace of God…
And for sure, I’m susceptible to ragebait. My least favourite radio programme is When it hits the fan (BBC Radio 4, Wednesdays, 4.02 pm.) I say “least favourite”. So why do I bother listening? It’s a programme about PR, Public Relations, a world which I frankly detest. Yet I listen in, regularly, with sickly fascination. Ragebait, you see. It’s only for fifteen minutes, I tell myself. (The podcast is longer.) On one level it’s good listening. Two PR gurus, David Yelland and Simon Lewis, have worked in the field at the top level. They are clearly masters of their brief, and they are very good at having a blether. November 26th’s programme was entitled Power, PR and the “Epstein Class”. Now that President Trump has allowed access to the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, there has been a media feeding frenzy over their content. Apparently they are a window on the world of the great and the good. This is how the top drawer communicate with one another, in succinct sound bites. The more top drawer you are, the less you need to say. This has nothing at all to do with Epstein’s sexual exploitation and criminality. Yelland and Lewis were at pains to acknowledge how grotesque all of that was, and then to lay it to one side. No. The emails were a demonstration of how power works. Epstein made himself a multimillionaire by building up a network, and trafficking information. We thought we knew where power resides, over here, for example, in Westminster, or the British Establishment. We thought we knew who runs the world. But no. These emails, this exclusive chat room if you will – here reside the people who run the world.
This world is very mobile. Many of the emails start, quite simply, with the question, “Where are you now?” Somebody on the New York Times has described these exchanges as “nomadic bat signals”. Then there is the exchange of information. Or at least a taster, much like click bait. I know why so-and-so met DJT (the president elect) at such-and-such golf course. Apparently this piece of information gives the bearer something known in the PR world as “edge”. Anyway, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, apparently the age of the email is over. All the movers and shakers have ditched it, gone under cover, and moved over to obscure platforms where their succinct messages can be encrypted.
It occurred to me that “edge” could easily have been word of the year. Perhaps it would be sexier in German. Vorsprung. You know. Vorsprung durch Technik. But how hellish it must be to have one’s life dominated by the constant pursuit of “edge”. You can never be out of touch, off line, whatever the obscure platform you are using, for fear of losing edge. That is precisely why adolescents are addicted to their devices. In their own social world, they are in constant fear of losing edge. It’s a PR disaster to be out of the loop. The Australian Government, which recognises that the influence of social media upon young people has been malignant, is trying to ban ten specific platforms for use by people under the age of 16. Of course teenagers are much more tech-savvy than their elders, and will find a way round it, if they want to.
But that’s the trouble with living your life through a smartphone or a computer screen. The pursuit of edge is fundamentally puerile. It’s quite a thought that the people who – at least according to Yelland and Lewis – run the world, have been infantilised.
One of the most depressing images in our political life is the sight of an MP sitting on the green benches, or an MSP in the chamber at Holyrood for that matter, staring, preoccupied, at their smartphone. I wish our politicians would dump social media, the preoccupation with image, dump their SPAVS, log off, and speak truth to us directly, in syntactically correct sentences with principal and subordinate clauses, and not in emoji-strewn nomadic bat signals. The medium is not the message. A pox on your PR.
jamescalumcampbell 