As has become customary, the various word of the year announcements are upon us in what has become an effective piece of content marketing. They generate think pieces – like this one – and remind you that dictionaries are still around.
This year, the Oxford University Press's word of the year is "rage bait". I know what you’re thinking: that’s two words. Which begs the question, is selecting rage bait as the word of the year in itself a piece of rage bait?
For the blissfully unfamiliar, it refers to “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic or engagement".
Anyone who has spent a minute online in the past decade knows exactly what that means. Our entire online culture, which now essentially means our global cultural lingua franca, has devolved into a series of rage bait moments.
From headlines engineered to provoke, capitalising on platforms optimised to serve anger over delight, to a creator economy that rewards escalating extremity, it’s everywhere. It is so pervasive that the media release from the Oxford University Press came with a graph explaining that its use has tripled in the past
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