• Information Overload: how outrage porn feeds our information addictions

    Author(s):
    Jennifer Samura (see profile)
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    CityLIS
    Subject(s):
    Information behavior, Information science, Library science
    Item Type:
    Dissertation
    Institution:
    City, University of London
    Tag(s):
    information addiction, Library & Information Science, outrage, Information behaviour, Library and information science
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/f90a-c552
    Abstract:
    Outrage porn is widely described as material used to evoke anger, disgust or indignation and is widespread on social media. Research discussed here concludes the stimulating nature of outrage porn and the emotions they produce leave our brains in high arousal states encouraging us to react, which on social media translates to likes, shares, retweets and comments. The endless streams of content on social media creates a cycle of information seeking which feeds information overload and addiction. The nature of outrage porn exacerbates this process as it triggers active emotions making it more likely we’ll share and react to the content spreading outrage porn on social media. Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 have dominated headlines and consumed much of 2020 so that will be the focus of this dissertation. This research examines what expressions of outrage content look like for tweets collected about the Black Lives Matter protests and Covid-19 in the form of a discourse analysis. A simple impact assessment (the Outrage Discourse Indicators) was created for the discourse analysis to examine what outrage porn looks like. The findings treat the outrage tweets in the wider context of the current events and examines the themes that can be drawn from them in relation to outrage porn. Outrage expressed in Black Lives Matter tweets presented differently to Covid-19 and this research will discuss these different types of outrage expression. As part of the findings and discussions a short discussion of how outrage porn relates to information addiction is be included to support the conclusions.
    Metadata:
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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