When I was growing up, Howard Stern was on the radio. I know he’s still around, now on satellite and all that, but I’m talking about the radio. I’m 46 now and it seems appropriate that I start talking about how things were when I was young, and how different they are now. There is quite a market for that kind of thing.
At any rate, when I was growing up, morning DJs on the radio were a big deal. The morning DJ usually spent more time talking than playing music, would often do ridiculous on-air stunts, interview famous people, and have contests where people could call in to the station to try to win tickets to nearby events – concerts, movie premieres, the motorcross, things like that. Of course they had to be funny, and they had to appeal to people across all sorts of demographics.
Each city had their own local personalities. I grew up in the 80’s in Southern California and we had multiple competing options: Rick Dees was on KIIS FM, and Mark and Brian were on KLOS. Those were the big two, but I also remember local favorites Kevin & Bean on KROQ, and Scott Shannon on KQLZ. All these had their place. But then Howard Stern happened. Howard Stern was not local. His show was broadcast from New York, but that didn’t matter: Once it showed up in southern California, all the other shows were competing for second place.
Howard Stern did all the things a morning DJ is supposed to do. But he was genuinely outrageous: He said and did controversial things without apology or excuse. He was crass and shocking, but also surprisingly articulate, passionate, and thoughtful. Somehow he was often both at the same time. Whether you loved or hated him, whether you thought he was a blessing or a blight – this all seemed beside the point. He was a force of nature in popular culture. we paid attention.
In Private Parts: The Howard Stern Story, there is a great scene where the programming director describes Howard’s meteoric rise by explaining how the average time spent listening to radio was 18 minutes a day while the average Howard Stern fan listened for 80 minutes a day. He then says, when asked why they listened so long, the most common response was “I want to see what he’ll say next.” But the research showed something else as well. While the average Stern fan listened for 80 minutes a day, the average Howard Stern detractor listened for 150 minutes a day – almost twice as long as those who loved him! When asked why they listened for so long, those who hated him responded, “I want to see what he’ll say next.”
We paid attention not in spite of his outrageousness, but because of it. In fact, if his outrageousness genuinely left us outraged, we listened longer – we listened more. Outrage, it turns out, is addictive.
Radio is mostly gone at this point – at least in terms of social relevance – but our addiction has not disappeared. Anyone who is familiar with addiction knows that it’s not static – addiction is either addressed and dealt with or it intensifies. And we are seeing that truth play out here and now. Howard Stern’s 1990s outrageousness seems relatively tame in our current cultural context. Our own government leaders say, write, and post things every day that would have gotten Stern fined or thrown off the air. Sometimes we say we support these people despite how outrageous they are, but I wonder.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, especially in terms of social media. Social media is at the center of our current cultural experience. 72% of Americans are on some form of social media – with 279 million on Facebook alone. The majority of Americans claim to get our news from social media. This is where we are paying attention.
And us paying attention is the point. It’s how social media companies – like radio stations – make their money. The goal is to keep people engaged. We get it. We are not naïve. We understand why this is. The longer you stay engaged, the more advertisements you’ll see, the more money the platform can charge for ad space. There is more to it though.
With social media, you are not the customer – you are the product.
You already know this, either explicitly or implicitly – but it somehow escapes the conversations we are having about the way we are all socializing right now. We are using social media platforms to begin, maintain, strengthen relationships. We use them without paying a dime, and the people who run these platforms are billionaires. How? They make their money selling advertising space, yes, but they also make money selling our information. We are the product. Our likes and dislikes. Our passions and frustrations. Our music, movie, television, and political preferences are all data the collection of which has made some people unspeakably wealthy.
And what these companies have found – and this should be no surprise based on what we learned from Howard Stern – is that we will stay engaged longer and give more of our time, opinions, and information up willingly when we are being outraged. Social media does not exist to support me in my connections and nurture my relationships. It exists to make money. It makes more money when I am outraged. And it is structured to show me more things that will outrage me so I will stay engaged and be a more profitable product.
Am I addicted to outrage myself? I think so. I keep taking breaks from writing this and scrolling through stories on my social media. I say I’m trying to keep up with the news, or to stay connected with friends – and that’s not totally false. But much of the way I am staying connected with friends is by sharing with them the outrageous things. There are many many outrageous things happening every day it turns out.
I do not have a perfect solution for how you and I should be engaging with the world around us – which social media is worth our time and which isn’t, how we should get our news or connect with our friends and family. And I don’t believe we should shield ourselves from outrageous things: Our world is outrageous in many ways. To pay authentic attention will cause us to be bothered and unsettled. Turning away from disturbing truths insulates us from the pain and suffering of others and distorts our sense of reality.
I read somewhere recently – probably on Instagram – someone asking the question: Who profits from your outrage? And I suppose that is the thing I am not able to shake. The question that is running through my mind in all of this. And the awareness that I am a product in this equation.
We are not products to God. We are family. We are belonging. The Christian witness is not empty of outrage, but the outrage we experience is not meant to keep us riveted, to keep us online, to get more from us: In the Christian life, outrage is a proper emotional response to injustice, marginalization, and dehumanization, that sparks loving, humanizing, connecting, peacemaking action. When writing to a group of new Christians trying to figure out how to build healthy community in the real world, St. Paul said, “Don’t be conformed by this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
We don’t have to wonder what Paul considered good and acceptable and perfect. He said it time and time again: To love. To love one another. To live in love. To love love. To build communities centered in love. To humanize one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to recognize and honor God’s presence in one another, to see each other not as obstacles but as members of the same holy body. “Do not be overcome by evil,” he wrote, “but overcome evil with good.”
I do not believe we will fully escape the outrage in this life, but we don’t have to be owned by it.
