"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." When Macbeth utters these lines, he's talking about the totality of life. Today, we can apply these words to the Internet.
The Internet outrage machine is good for page views; it isn’t very good for anything else. It's always the same thing: a celebrity says something stupid, or a new light is shed on an old atrocity. Like this week, an undergraduate student wrote a shitty think piece. The outrage machine can be thrown into motion by something as small as a tweet or as large as institutionalized acceptance of sexual assault. Usually, the result is the same: nothing changes and the Internet finds something new to bitch about.
Sports, government, entertainment, finance: every sphere of life offers us something to get mad at. The process is always the same: We learn about the terrible thing; we tell our friends about the terrible thing; we blog about the terrible thing; then we forget about the terrible thing. Quite often, the terrible thing that so enraged us still continues on long after our anger has subsided and we’ve turned our attention back to cat GIFs and hamsters eating burritos. Here are just a few things that the Internet got really upset about that hasn't changed at all. Here are 15 Internet Outrages That Changed Nothing.