Why are we living in an age of anger – is it because of the fifty-year rage cycle?

To distinguish “good” anger from “bad” anger – indeed, to determine whether anything productive could come of a given spurt of rage – it is worth considering the purpose of anger. “Its purpose is to maintain personal boundaries. So, if somebody crosses you, gets in your space, insults you, touches you, you’re going to get angry and the productive use of anger is to say: ‘Fuck off,’” Balick says. The complicating feature of social media is that “someone might be stepping on our identity or our belief system”. So, the natural sense of scale you get in the offline world – a stranger could run over your toes with a shopping trolley but, being a stranger, would find it hard to traduce your essential nature – is collapsed in the virtual one. In the act of broadcasting who we are – what we believe, what we look like, what we are eating, who we love – we offer up a vast stretch of personal boundary that could be invaded by anyone, even by accident. Usually it is not an accident, though; usually they do it on purpose.

Basically highlights the need for defensive tools like privacy settings and invite-only and muting.