Disruptive rhetoric in an age of outrage

Abstract: Online discursive practices often take place within a context know as an age of outrage. This culture of outrage dominates the current socio-political condition showing few, if any, signs of subsiding. In fact, this project suggests that outrage culture is an inescapable societal framework within which rhetors operate today. Outrage culture can be understood as the tendency for individuals to react publicly to any rhetorical action that is deemed offensive, insensitive, or uncivil in nature. These outraged reactions are often mob-like in nature; they are polarized, politicized, and enacted quickly without further investigation into the context, meaning, and intentions of the original rhetorical action. This project asks: under what circumstances can rhetors offer stylized answers for dealing with socio-political issues in an age of outrage? This research reveals that some rhetors use disruptive rhetoric to challenge hierarchical structures, utilizing the rhetorical concept of “impiety,” which in turn can create publics within digital, discursive spaces. These digitally networked publics demonstrate how groups coalesce and self-organize in order to discuss, negotiate, and contest meaning in response to disruptive acts. This project also proposes that affective releases can sustain networked publics through public displays of emotion and intensity as they seek to reorder and reorganize disrupted hierarchies. Archival research on digital platforms provides digital methods to locate the formulation of these networked, affective publics by tracking specific hashtags responding to disruptive rhetorical strategies. Hashtags become sites of affect wherein publics debate, deliberate, and contest deeper meanings of messages offered by disruptive rhetors. Additionally, this project utilizes close reading methods to reveal the affective nature of these hashtagged responses, which create rhetorical space for publics to feel their way into understanding. This project’s goal is to not only propose new approaches for understanding disruptive rhetorical strategies, but also offer methods to track and locate future disruptions in an age of outrage.