By Micah Sébastien Zhang
Sometimes I think human thoughts and patterns are strange — sometimes even blatantly strange and intellectually-defunct. My mind often circles back to this wild statement after much observation as a new generation person breed by perpetual online content.
Quite recently, Oxford University Press has chosen the term "rage bait" as the Word of the Year of 2025. The term "rage bait" is "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content" as defined by their given explanation. Their presented graphic showed that the usage of the term has been sharply rising since around June of 2024.
This wasn’t the first time that Oxford UP decided to bring in significant attention to rapidly developing internet jargons. Last year, the term "brain rot" was selected as the Word of the Year in 2024. A technical definition for this term would be about meaningless pieces of low-effort content circulating on the internet, yet a figurative definition would be an alarming symbolism that marks the downfall of communications and record-keeping of the humanity.
My growth as a 2005-born Millennial defined my intertwining love-hate relationship with the internet, and now my current identity as a media studies student is adding a touch of sour taste to recognizing the reality. My early days of internet exploration around 2016 opened myself up to the massive culmination of mankind knowledge (whether it’s good or bad); the sense of novelty was lingering among the majority of good-faith online communities (I missed the days watching DanTDM as a child). Yet now coming to the end of 2025 as a (questionable) self-functioning adult after learning three years of formal media jargons, this sense of novelty was eventually replaced with subtle nausea on overwhelming effects of emotions transmitting throughout the internet.
On a deeper reflective level, this feeling now feels more like a side effect of internet or mass communication as expected from media richness theory, which was developed by Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel in the 1980s. The theory developed a framework to assess different means of communications depending on their "richness" — the ability to accurately convey information with as minimum misintepretations as possible.
A core of the internet relies on mass communication and digitization of traditional humanistic experiences, and the concepts within the media richness theory seem to alarm us of a possible outcome. Concepts mentioned in the media richness theory, such as paralanguage, social cues, and social presence — which are all heavily present in in-person communications — are mostly-to-always compressed and distorted during the transformation to digitized spaces. A simple "I love you" to a person could be reprinted and reproduced numerous times on language-prevalent platforms like Twitter and Facebook; the cues brought by tone, body languages, and facial expressions were, however, obliterated by the digital presence, despite the fact that they’re heavily influential on conveying deep meanings.
Rage bait could be pretty much interpreted as the direct result of phenomenon. The social media’s lessening capacity to hold long-form discussions is leading to a tendency of encouraging primal flirts to trigger simple emotions, yet ironically speaking, keeping content forms simple for social media seems like a popular solution for a social media platform to thrive. It might seems just easy for us to randomly post anything on Twitter within a 140-word limit, preferably with some pictures to spice up your content. The ultimate outcome we often hope for from posting would be engagement and acknowledgements, whether it could be simple as a like or retweet or as complex as a well-written and formatted reply. But the mediation of language itself is inevitable (and I would personally call it as the curse of language); it’s almost impossible to mirror a specific segment of your personal, in-real-life experience onto a short amount of text and expect other people can feel your same experience through the text. On topics such as debates over ideas and opinions that would often take an insurmountable effort form proper engagements and arguments, the text itself on those topics over social media doesn’t just represent a description, but rather a much dwindled tag of primal humanistic emotions.
What lies the real danger here is that the delivery format of social media is driving such engagements — exchanges of primal humanistic emotions. The root of conflicts inside mankind could be just coming from a small misunderstanding. If one day the boundaries between online and real-life interactions blurred, I must say that I’m not highly optimistic of what might be the outcome.
Sure, you can say it’s primal humanistic emotions again. ("We’re just humans, right?") Just don’t think that I’ll take all those norms in peace.
Works Consulted
Heaton, Benedict. “‘Brain Rot’ Named Oxford Word of the Year 2024.” Oxford University Press, 2 Dec. 2024, corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024.
Heaton, Benedict. “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 Is Rage Bait.” Oxford University Press, 1 Dec. 2025, corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait.
“Media Richness Theory | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/media-richness-theory#terms-&-concepts.
Copyright Acknowledgement
Cover feature image by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash.
Hi Micah! I totally relate to your reflection about growing up online. I also feel that tension between loving the internet and feeling overwhelmed by what it has become. It made me curious how you see this evolving. Do you think users can push back against the rise of rage bait through new norms and habits, or is this trend already too ingrained in the way platforms reward engagement?
Hi Micah, very interesting post! I wasn’t aware that the Oxford Dictionary picked this word as their word of the year, but it’s interesting that this choice could also be seen as “rage-baiting” in a way. I particularly resonated with your observation about how important concepts of paralanguage, social cues, and social presence are almost always distorted or completely obsolete, which causes messages to often be decoded inaccurately by the viewer. In addition to being able to “trick” people into engaging with outrageous content, this phenomenon reminds me of Verbeek’s concept of technological intentionality — the ideas that technology and platforms have intentions that can cause real change. The way social media platforms and their comment sections are designed purposefully doesn’t allow for effective communication of emotions, which causes users to get more emotionally invested and engage more. This can disadvantage many different people, but especially neurodivergent users who have a hard time picking up tone and meaning even in real-life conversations. I remember that this led to the popularization of tone tags — especially during COVID. Overall, this post is a great example of how technology and media can create tangible change in our behaviour and popular culture.
Hi Micah,
Your concluding comments about the issues you wrote about regarding language being more blurred between online and in-person spaces is really interesting, as I hadn’t actually considered how combining the two would result in a worse outcome. My mind immediately goes to “Ready Player One”, the book/movie that basically makes VR the way to access gaming and the world, but both the movie and book were made nearly a decade ago now, and so assuming that the ways in which people interact within them (legible texts, proper grammar when talking verbally) seems silly in retrospect, despite the concept not actually being real yet. I’m curious, did you consider VR/AR when you wrote about the line between online and in-person interactions being blurred in the future, and what do you think the ultimate effect on language will be?