Peter Ayolov

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ', ‘the media scenario ' and the shift from narrative to script to psychodrama as a defining pathway of the new paradigm of mass communication. It argues that contemporary media no longer organise experience primarily through finished stories with closure, but through script-like formats designed for continuous participation, escalation, and measurable reaction. In this environment, the ‘media scenario’ functions as an operational structure that distributes roles, cues emotional performances, and sustains attention through open-ended conflict. The article proposes that the classical narrative contract—distance between spectacle and spectator, temporal boundaries, and interpretative reflection—has been progressively replaced by a culture of enactment, in which audiences become performers and meaning is generated through real-time feedback. Drawing on psychodramatic concepts such as role reversal, doubling, mirroring, and the management of spontaneity, the analysis shows how media platforms translate therapeutic techniques into industrial systems of visibility: emotion becomes content, identity becomes a role, and authenticity becomes a function of immediacy. The result is a public sphere increasingly structured as an endless session without frame or closure, where crises are staged as episodic confrontations and social belonging is secured through shared affect rather than shared deliberation. By linking narratology, screenwriting theory, and psychodrama, the article outlines a media-critical model of contemporary communication in which scripts govern participation and psychodramatic intensity substitutes for public reasoning—raising urgent questions about agency, responsibility, and the ethics of staging in digital culture.

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ', ‘the media scenario ' and pseudo-events and pseudo-worlds as the central operating units of the new paradigm of mass communication and of the media scenario. Building on The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, pseudo-events are treated not as occasional distortions of public life but as a routine mode of reality-production: events increasingly occur in order to be narrated, circulated, replayed, and emotionally ‘confirmed’ by audiences. The argument extends this logic from events to worlds. Drawing on possible worlds theory and contemporary narratology associated with Marie-Laure Ryan, pseudo-worlds are defined as coherent but strategically engineered storyworlds that can be entered, inhabited, and defended as if actual. In networked environments, these worlds are sustained less by evidence than by repeatable narrative roles, affective cues, and the infrastructural design of platforms. Hyperlinks, interfaces, and procedural media function as ontological switches that intensify re-centring and multiply ‘world transitions’, enabling rapid movement between fiction, documentation, and hybrid scenography. As a result, publics no longer share a single ‘mass’ reality but participate in overlapping and competing world-models, each with its own internal truth conditions and moral coordinates. The media scenario is therefore approached as a system of world-building in which attention, identity, and political alignment are organised through scripted participation rather than deliberation. The article concludes that the key struggle of contemporary communication is not primarily over facts, but over the design, accessibility, and durability of pseudo-worlds that convert narrative coherence into social power.

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and rethinks the concept of the mass audience under conditions of digital media, narrative proliferation, and participatory communication. Drawing on contemporary media psychology, narratology, and media-conscious narrative theory, it argues that the classical notion of a homogeneous, passive audience is no longer analytically adequate. Media narratives today operate through processes of identification, interpretation, and participation that transform viewers into active agents within a broader media scenario. Building on empirical research into the effects of narrative identification on the audience’s sense of self, the article shows how media stories exert both immediate emotional influence and delayed cognitive effects that reshape self-efficacy, motivation, and identity orientation. Narrative engagement functions not as simple persuasion, but as a mechanism that activates latent personal traits and integrates them into the individual’s self-conception over time. At the same time, narratological theory demonstrates that these effects are structurally produced through narrative organisation—fabula, focalisation, character construction, and event sequencing—rather than through the ‘reality’ of the story itself. In networked and transmedia environments, audiences no longer merely interpret narratives but actively extend, remix, and inhabit storyworlds across platforms, dissolving the boundary between author, character, and viewer. The mass audience thus fragments into a multiplicity of individual narrative trajectories, each shaped by biography, attention, and interaction. The article situates this transformation within a broader paradigm shift in mass communication, from message transmission to media scenarios in which audiences perform roles, rehearse identities, and generate real social effects through fictional and semi-fictional constructs. The mass audience is reconceptualised not as a collective receiver, but as a distributed field of narrative participation in which fiction produces real consequences and media narratives become engines of self-formation and social coordination.

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and develops the concept of the media narrative as a central analytical framework for understanding communication in the digital age. Drawing on Peter Ayolov’s theoretical work and engaging with Snezhana Popova’s Media Narrative (2017), it argues that contemporary mass communication can no longer be adequately described as the transmission of information, but must be understood as a process of interpretation, narrative construction, and identity formation. In an environment characterised by informational abundance, interactivity, and networked participation, communication increasingly loses its reciprocal dimension and is replaced by fragmented interpretative practices. Media narratives function as mechanisms through which societies organise experience, produce meaning, and stabilise collective and personal identities amid informational overload. The article examines how narrative operates across different levels—micro, meso, and macro—linking individual media fragments to broader symbolic structures that shape public perception and collective memory. It further analyses the transformation of authorship, the blurring of boundaries between sender and audience, and the role of interactivity in turning narrative into a shared, processual, and often contested space. Particular attention is given to the power of news narratives to construct social reality, emotional climates, and collective fate, especially under conditions of crisis, war, and political polarisation. Rather than treating narrative as a neutral form, the article conceptualises it as a structuring force that mediates between fact and meaning, truth and interpretation, history and lived experience. It concludes that media narrative remains indispensable for preserving the human dimension of communication, even as it becomes increasingly vulnerable to manipulation, spectacle, and the erosion of trust. Understanding media narratives is therefore essential for rethinking journalism, public discourse, and the ethical responsibility of communication in the twenty-first century.

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' as a theoretical refinement of media narrative analysis for the twenty-first century. Drawing on Peter Ayolov’s The Media Scenario: Scriptwriting for Journalists (2026) and positioned as an informal continuation of Prof. Snezhana Popova’s Media Narrative (Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, Sofia University, 2017), it argues that contemporary communication can no longer be understood primarily as the telling of stories about reality, but as the scripting of reality itself through participatory media environments. In digital networks, the audience is no longer a passive receiver of narrative, but an active co-performer within scenario-like structures that unfold in real time across platforms. The article proposes that scriptwriting craft should be treated not merely as a professional technique for screenwriters, but as a mode of critical thinking indispensable for journalists and public communicators: an analytic competence for recognising how roles, plots, and identities are assigned, rehearsed, and normalised through media dynamics. This shift requires moving beyond linear transmission models such as Shannon and Weaver’s, and beyond effect-centred questions of persuasion, towards a transformation-centred paradigm focused on how participants change while speaking and acting within mediated dramaturgies. The media scenario is conceptualised as a transmedia, interactive configuration composed of micro-narratives, feedback loops, and ‘media gameplay’ through which users continually rewrite the plot via posts, comments, and reactions. Within this framework, journalism becomes both an interpretive practice and a moral trial: the central danger is not technical incompetence but ethical drift, in which truth is reduced to a genre and professional success becomes a gradual surrender of perception, empathy, and memory. The article concludes that the most urgent task for media education is to cultivate scenario-awareness and moral orientation, enabling future journalists to remain free participants rather than instruments within scripted systems of attention, emotion, and power.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine why anger exists by combining evolutionary psychology with a sociology of digital communication. Drawing on the recalibrational theory of anger developed by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, it argues that anger evolved as a strategic social emotion designed to renegotiate unfair welfare tradeoffs, enforce boundaries and deter exploitation. Far from being a loss of control, anger functioned as an internal alarm system that mobilised energy, signalled resolve and restored balance within small-scale social environments. The article then shows how this adaptive mechanism becomes systematically distorted in digital societies. Networked communication systems continuously activate anger through symbolic cues, algorithmic amplification and attention-based incentives while removing the conditions necessary for resolution, negotiation and recalibration. As a result, anger shifts from an episodic corrective response to a chronic background state. What once stabilised cooperation now accumulates into permanent grievance, narrowed judgement and identity-based hostility. The article argues that digital platforms do not merely host anger but exploit its evolved alarm properties, transforming a survival mechanism into an infrastructure of engagement, visibility and power. Understanding why anger exists is therefore essential for explaining both its historical value and its contemporary dysfunction in networked public life.

This article develops the concepts of 'manufacture of dissent ', ‘moral outrage networks ’ , and 'Propaganda 2.1 model' as an analytical framework for understanding power, communication and media control under conditions of platform capitalism. Building on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classical propaganda model and Christian Fuchs’s formulation of ‘Propaganda 2.0’, the article argues that contemporary propaganda no longer operates primarily through persuasion, ideological coherence or the manufacture of consent. Instead, it functions through the systematic production of dissent and the monetisation of moral outrage as its core economic logic. Propaganda 2.1 describes a media environment in which engagement optimisation displaces truth, meaning and deliberation, and where outrage becomes the most efficient unit of value extraction. The model identifies three interlocking mechanisms: rage-baiting as industrial provocation, semantic banalisation through automated and repetitive content production, and parasociality as simulated intimacy that replaces civic participation with emotional attachment. Together, these mechanisms transform public communication into an infrastructure of affect extraction, where attention is continuously harvested while collective judgement erodes. The article further reframes the classical five-filter model for the digital age, showing how ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology are reconfigured around engagement metrics, algorithmic governance and emotional volatility. Propaganda 2.1 thus marks a shift from shaping belief to engineering reaction, from public opinion to emotional circulation, and from ideological persuasion to the liquidation of meaning itself. In this environment, dissent is no longer oppositional but systemic, and outrage becomes the dominant technology of power in the digital public sphere.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to explain how righteous anger is transformed from a morally oriented response to injustice into a managed, pleasurable, and self-reinforcing form of dissent within digital media environments. Drawing on moral philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, religious ethics, and media sociology, the article argues that righteous anger possesses a distinctive affective appeal rooted in both evolutionary alarm mechanisms and reward-related neural processes. Moral anger not only signals norm violation and motivates corrective action; it also restores a sense of agency, reinforces moral identity, and produces emotional gratification. This hedonic dimension helps explain why righteous anger is difficult to relinquish, even when it no longer leads to effective action or repair. The article traces how digital platforms amplify this dynamic by rewarding outrage with visibility, affirmation, and social belonging, converting moral judgement into a repeatable emotional loop. Through analyses of moral panic, indignation, addiction-like outrage patterns, and distinctions between righteous and entitled anger, the article shows how ethical concern can be redirected toward performative condemnation and identity formation. Classical and religious traditions on anger, alongside Aristotelian moderation, are revisited to demonstrate that the moral value of anger depends not on its intensity but on its orientation, limits, and willingness to dissolve once justice is pursued. The article concludes that contemporary media systems increasingly govern dissent not by suppressing anger, but by sustaining its pleasurable form, detaching moral energy from responsibility and embedding outrage within the political economy of attention.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe anger as a patterned social force that has been reorganised by digital communication systems into a form of distributed social infrastructure. Drawing on sociological work on anger and emotion, it argues that anger is neither a private disturbance nor a purely spontaneous moral reaction, but a socially produced, socially sanctioned, and unevenly distributed process shaped by status, roles, inequality, and institutional pressure. In networked publics, the article shows, anger is increasingly detached from immediate interaction and reattached to platform-driven cycles of provocation, attribution, display, and reward. This shift produces a public sphere in which low-level irritation becomes continuous, moral interpretation is accelerated, and blame is made readily available through simplified causal stories and symbolic enemies. Anger operates simultaneously as a power emotion and a mechanism of social control: it asserts dominance, signals entitlement, disciplines boundaries, and legitimises punishment, while also arising from perceived powerlessness when harm is judged remediable and blameworthy. By integrating research on social rage, political escalation, and social learning, the article proposes that moral outrage online is best understood as learned behaviour reinforced by metrics, imitation, and network norms. The result is not simply ‘more anger’, but a new architecture of anger in which outrage becomes predictable, reproducible, and strategically valuable for actors and systems that benefit from attention, polarisation, and moral drama. The sociology of anger, the article concludes, must therefore expand beyond roles and institutions to include platforms, algorithmic feedback, and network effects as central determinants of how societies feel, judge, mobilise, and govern dissent.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine the rationality of anger within contemporary media environments shaped by digital capitalism, situating anger at the intersection of instrumental action, moral judgement, and epistemic perception. Drawing on the concepts of ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it argues that anger cannot be evaluated solely as an individual psychological state but must be understood as a socially conditioned and increasingly engineered communicative force. Classical and contemporary accounts of anger are revisited to show that anger can be instrumentally effective, normatively appropriate, and epistemically revealing under specific conditions, particularly when it functions as a demand for recognition rather than retribution. However, the article demonstrates that these rational capacities are fragile and context-dependent. In digital communication systems organised around attention, engagement, and escalation, anger is systematically detached from recognition and resolution and repurposed as a visibility amplifier, identity marker, and economic resource. What appears as rational anger at the level of individual interaction becomes structurally irrational at the level of collective outcomes, producing polarisation, cognitive rigidity, and the erosion of trust. The article further argues that contemporary media infrastructures exploit anger’s rational form while neutralising its corrective function, transforming it into a reproducible grammar of miscommunication. Under conditions of planned obsolescence of communication, anger no longer serves cooperation or moral repair but becomes an infrastructure of permanent dissent and discommunication. The rationality of anger, the article concludes, must therefore be assessed in relation to the communicative systems that shape its expression, reward its escalation, and redirect its moral force toward systemic instability.

This article theorises ‘the morality of anger’ within the framework of manufacture of dissent and moral outrage networks , arguing that anger’s ethical status cannot be assessed as a private psychological state once it becomes infrastructural, amplified, and monetised. Classical condemnations of anger, from Seneca’s image of anger as madness to Martha Nussbaum’s critique of retributive ‘payback’ thinking, treat anger as morally suspect because it tends to imagine compensation through another’s suffering. Yet rehabilitative traditions, from Aristotle’s doctrine of fitting anger to contemporary defences of righteous anger in response to structural injustice, insist that anger can be a condition of dignity, recognition, and moral repair. The article resolves this tension by shifting the unit of analysis from individual anger to networked anger. In digital publics, the boundary between justified anger and arrogant status-anger becomes systematically blurred: status anxiety is reframed as injury, grievance is aestheticised as virtue, and indignation is rewarded as a performance of belonging. Drawing on relational and pluralist accounts, the article treats anger as behaviourally pluripotent, capable of motivating communication, withdrawal, reconciliation, or retaliation depending on social cues and institutional constraints. In outrage-driven media ecologies, those constraints are stripped away and replaced by engagement incentives, so anger is selected for portability, intensity, and punitive clarity rather than proportion, truth, or repair. The article therefore distinguishes moral anger as ethical work from outrage as moral fuel. Moral anger retains value when it remains accountable to truth, proportionality, and the possibility of recognition, and when it is disciplined by compassion understood as agape rather than weaponised into hatred. Outrage networks, by contrast, convert anger into a renewable resource for attention extraction, stabilising communities through shared enemies and escalating moral certainty without increasing responsibility. The central claim is that anger is structurally necessary to moral life, yet morally dangerous when engineered as infrastructure: the ethical task is not to abolish anger but to recover the conditions under which it can still point beyond punishment toward repair, restraint, and civic coexistence.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse how moral anger is grammatically organised, economically exploited, and politically stabilised within contemporary media systems. Rather than treating outrage as a spontaneous emotional reaction, the article argues that it functions as a reproducible linguistic infrastructure that structures trust, suspicion, and collective alignment. Through a series of interconnected case analyses, the article demonstrates how outrage operates as grammar rather than affect: a set of recurring linguistic cues, moral codes, and classificatory mechanisms that pre-structure interpretation before empirical evaluation can occur. The discussion examines the revival of the term ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany as a compressed moral judgement that bypasses factual dispute and encodes institutional betrayal; the Bulgarian media environment, where the language of Russophilia and Russophobia transforms geopolitical orientation into enforced moral identity; the role of hostility indices as bureaucratic technologies that quantify and industrialise anger; and the emergence of cult-like linguistic practices in which double meanings, taboo-breaking, and initiation rituals consolidate moral communities through managed outrage. Drawing on research in moral psychology, hate-speech studies, and evolutionary accounts of threat perception, the article situates outrage within a harm-based moral framework in which competing claims of victimhood displace deliberation. It further argues that digital media environments monetise this moral grammar through attention economies that reward indignation, escalation, and ideological certainty. The central claim is that contemporary media no longer primarily manufacture consent but systematically manufacture dissent by converting distrust, hostility, and moral accusation into stable communicative resources. The result is a condition of post-democratic inertia in which speech proliferates while shared understanding collapses, and moral language persists not as a foundation of solidarity but as an infrastructure of permanent division.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine anger management not as a therapeutic technique or individual coping strategy, but as a central problem of contemporary communication systems that actively produce, circulate, and stabilise anger as a social resource. Drawing on the concepts of ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, the article argues that anger has shifted from a personal moral challenge into a managed and engineered medium of power. Classical and modern approaches that frame anger as a matter of self-control or choice are reinterpreted in light of digital environments in which anger is repeatedly invited, rewarded, and prolonged. The analysis shows how anger operates simultaneously as permission, displacement, and misdirection: it legitimises actions that would otherwise require justification, redirects frustration away from structural causes, and sustains attention economies that profit from unresolved conflict. Organisational, managerial, and institutional contexts further illustrate how anger is not eliminated but formatted, channelled, and selectively validated according to its usefulness for stability, compliance, and symbolic governance. Rather than resolving injustice or restoring trust, contemporary anger management practices often neutralise anger’s disruptive potential while preserving the conditions that generate it. The article concludes that anger management has become less about calming emotions and more about regulating dissent, converting moral energy into predictable, non-transformative forms. In this sense, anger is no longer managed to restore communication but engineered to sustain miscommunication, preparing the ground for discommunication as a durable social condition.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine 'rage bait' and 'anger clicking' as core mechanisms of contemporary digital media economies, arguing that outrage has become a primary driver of visibility, engagement, and profit. Building on the concepts of the ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it shows how the classical logic of propaganda oriented toward silence, conformity, and manufactured consent has been structurally inverted. In platform-based attention economies, dissent is no longer suppressed but actively cultivated, and anger functions as a predictable, extractable resource. The principle that ‘angry people click more’ is analysed not as a psychological curiosity but as an organising rule of digital capitalism, shaping content production, algorithmic ranking, and user behaviour. Rage bait is shown to rely less on plausibility or persuasion than on provocation, exploiting the fact that outrage generates reaction even when claims are openly implausible. Anger clicking converts moral concern into measurable engagement, transforming denunciation, correction, and ridicule into unpaid digital labour. Drawing on research in political communication, social psychology, and the sociology of online harassment, the article demonstrates how anger circulates collectively through networked infrastructures that reward escalation, polarisation, and symbolic conflict. The result is a communicative environment in which truth is economically disadvantaged, outrage is structurally rewarded, and dissent becomes a permanent and profitable output of the media system. Rage bait and anger clicking thus emerge not as pathologies of online culture but as rational adaptations to the incentive structures of platform capitalism.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse ''Outrage exploitation networks'' as a central mechanism of contemporary digital power. It argues that moral outrage has been transformed from a situational ethical response into an engineered, scalable and monetisable resource embedded in platform capitalism. The article conceptualises the ''Outrage-industrial complex'' as a loosely coordinated but structurally coherent subsystem linking media organisations, platform infrastructures, influencers, political entrepreneurs, fundraising operations and, at its most extreme margins, criminal and extremist actors. Within this system, outrage is not an accidental by-product of polarisation but a deliberately cultivated affective state designed to maximise engagement, visibility, loyalty and revenue. Drawing on sociology of emotions, political communication, platform studies and extremism research, the article shows how outrage exploitation networks operate through algorithmic amplification, ritualised discourse, identity-based antagonism and emotional feedback loops that reward escalation while penalising moderation. Outrage functions simultaneously as attention fuel, identity glue and mobilisation infrastructure, sustaining permanent dissent without resolution. The analysis further demonstrates how the same emotional logics underpin commercial outrage media, radical communities of hate and criminal exploitation networks, revealing a structural continuity between profit-driven polarisation and coercive or violent forms of digital harm. The article concludes that outrage exploitation networks represent a mature form of Propaganda 2.0: a system no longer oriented toward persuasion or consensus, but toward activation, antagonism and the continuous extraction of moral anger as economic and political value.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe a structural shift in the contemporary public sphere: moral emotion is no longer primarily episodic, locally regulated, and socially costly, but increasingly produced as a network function embedded in platform architectures. Drawing on the classical insight that collective anger can unify fractured worlds more effectively than justice or wisdom, the argument traces how digital media transform indignation into scalable infrastructure through the conversion of reaction into metrics, and metrics into revenue. In this environment, anger circulates more efficiently than truth because online communication is increasingly organised around affect management rather than deliberation, persuasion, or shared inquiry. Moral outrage becomes syntactic: titles, captions, hashtags, memes, and comments operate as portable triggers that recruit strangers into temporary moral collectives, while the design logic of visibility rewards escalation, certainty, and denunciation. The article reframes propaganda beyond the binary of truth and lies by showing how audiences participate in the production and amplification of outrage as a form of distributed labour, and how the attention economy privileges high-arousal moral signals (‘angry people click more’) as a reliable mechanism of engagement. It proposes seven hypotheses describing the infrastructuralisation of moral emotion, the dominance of feelings over facts in networked persuasion, the role of indignation in identity formation, the convergence of platform governance and political authority into anger management regimes, and the emergence of outrage exploitation systems that sustain perpetual moral trial. The result is a moral public sphere without durable morality: a simulation of righteousness detached from slow interpretation, mutual responsibility, and civic repair. Until digital communication is redesigned to reward restraint rather than reaction, moral anger will remain a primary organising principle of mass society, corroding trust and replacing democratic deliberation with cycles of manufactured indignation.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse how moral anger operates as a central motivational force in contemporary societies and how it is increasingly captured, organised, and amplified by digital media systems. Drawing on moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology, sociology, and media theory, the article argues that moral anger is not a pathological excess or a mere expressive outburst, but a socially structured emotion that links ethical perception to action, recognition to resistance, and individual judgement to collective mobilisation. Moral anger is examined through several interrelated forms, including indignation, moral panic, righteous anger, and organised outrage, each of which demonstrates how anger becomes morally charged, narratively framed, and politically consequential. Classical and contemporary debates on the moral justification of anger are revisited to show that anger has historically functioned as a signal of norm violation, a demand for recognition, and a catalyst for social change. At the same time, the article demonstrates how digital infrastructures transform these functions by rewarding escalation, permanence, and visibility, detaching anger from resolution and embedding it within attention-based economies. Moral panic illustrates how anger can be redirected toward symbolic enemies and used as a mechanism of governance, while moral outrage networks reveal how indignation is synchronised at scale, monetised, and converted into identity and power. The article concludes that moral anger remains indispensable for recognising injustice and motivating change, but that its contemporary amplification risks transforming a corrective moral force into a permanent infrastructure of polarisation, control, and managed dissent.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse how moral anger operates as a central motivational force in contemporary societies and how it is increasingly captured, organised, and amplified by digital media systems. Drawing on moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology, sociology, and media theory, the article argues that moral anger is not a pathological excess or a mere expressive outburst, but a socially structured emotion that links ethical perception to action, recognition to resistance, and individual judgement to collective mobilisation. Moral anger is examined through several interrelated forms, including indignation, moral panic, righteous anger, and organised outrage, each of which demonstrates how anger becomes morally charged, narratively framed, and politically consequential. Classical and contemporary debates on the moral justification of anger are revisited to show that anger has historically functioned as a signal of norm violation, a demand for recognition, and a catalyst for social change. At the same time, the article demonstrates how digital infrastructures transform these functions by rewarding escalation, permanence, and visibility, detaching anger from resolution and embedding it within attention-based economies. Moral panic illustrates how anger can be redirected toward symbolic enemies and used as a mechanism of governance, while moral outrage networks reveal how indignation is synchronised at scale, monetised, and converted into identity and power. The article concludes that moral anger remains indispensable for recognising injustice and motivating change, but that its contemporary amplification risks transforming a corrective moral force into a permanent infrastructure of polarisation, control, and managed dissent.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine anger as a central organising force of contemporary digital societies, arguing that anger has shifted from an episodic moral emotion into a programmable, networked social technology. Drawing on psychological, philosophical, religious and sociological perspectives, it shows how digital communication systems transform anger into a circulating signal that structures attention, identity and power. In online environments, anger is no longer primarily triggered by embodied encounters or local injustice, but by symbolic cues delivered through interfaces designed to stimulate arousal, anticipation and reaction. Platforms exploit anger’s cognitive effects – perceptual narrowing, risk distortion, moral certainty and heightened engagement – converting emotional response into behavioural data and economic value. The article analyses how anger reshapes cognition, memory and judgement, producing simplified moral worlds in which blame is personalised, complexity collapses and outrage becomes resistant to correction. It situates contemporary digital anger within longer philosophical and religious debates about the legitimacy, danger and governance of anger, showing how ancient concerns with restraint, proportion and accountability are destabilised by infrastructures that reward immediacy and intensity. Particular attention is given to rage and outrage as engineered conditions: rage as anger intensified through constant stimulation and social reward, and outrage as moral spectacle that translates indignation into public performance, punishment and belonging. The article argues that anger now functions as a form of affective infrastructure, synchronising dispersed publics into moral collectives while eroding deliberation, trust and repair. Understanding anger today therefore requires moving beyond individual psychology toward a sociology of digital systems that manufacture, normalise and monetise anger as the dominant affect of public life.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to explain how digital capitalism reorganises democratic communication around the production, circulation, and monetisation of moral anger. It argues that contemporary democracies are not collapsing but mutating into forms of decorative democracy, in which institutional procedures persist while their deliberative and integrative functions are hollowed out by market-driven media infrastructures. Under conditions of platform capitalism, dissent is no longer primarily a corrective force directed at power but a commodified resource optimised for attention, engagement, and perpetual conflict. Drawing on political economy, media theory, moral psychology, and communication studies, the article analyses how outrage operates as a stable grammar rather than an episodic emotion, structuring trust, untrust, loyalty, and hostility across digital publics. It shows how informational inequality, algorithmic mediation, and strategic interventions such as cognitive infiltration transform dissent into a managed and often ineffectual spectacle, while simultaneously eroding social capital and shared reality. The article further examines the emotional mechanisms of anger and ressentiment, the rise of grievance politics, and the emergence of performative or kayfabe politics, in which publics knowingly participate in staged conflicts that sustain moral mobilisation without enabling collective resolution. The central claim is that digital capitalism has shifted democratic governance from the manufacture of consent to the manufacture of dissent, producing a communicative environment characterised by permanent polarisation, declining trust, and the planned obsolescence of communication itself. In this environment, political anger circulates freely but rarely translates into structural change, while democracy survives increasingly as form rather than substance.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ through a historical and sociological reading of Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud. Using Gay’s analysis of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture as its primary anchor, the article reconstructs a genealogy of anger in which hostility is not treated as a timeless instinct or spontaneous reaction to suffering, but as a socially organised and morally licensed resource. It argues that modern societies learned to manage anger by refining, disguising and redistributing aggression through institutions, rituals, disciplinary practices and emerging media systems. Bourgeois modernity did not suppress hatred; it moralised it, converting aggression into acceptable forms such as righteous indignation, patriotic duty, scientific authority and humanitarian discipline. Through practices ranging from duelling and corporal punishment to penal reform, advice literature and public humour, anger was rendered repeatable, respectable and scalable. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s insight that rage presupposes blame rather than misfortune, the article shows how anger became detached from immediate injury and sustained instead by narrative, classification and moral alibis. This historical transformation is presented as a decisive precondition for contemporary digital outrage, where anger circulates infrastructurally rather than episodically. By situating present-day moral outrage within a longer genealogy of cultivated hatred, the article reframes digital anger not as a novel pathology but as the latest configuration of a modern emotional technology designed to govern dissent, organise belonging and legitimate power. What is the genealogy of modern collective hatred?

This article develops the concept of Homo citans "The Quoting Man" as a critical figure for understanding authorship, originality, and knowledge production in late modernity. Rather than treating quotation as a secondary scholarly technique, the text argues that citation is the primary mode of human thought and expression, revealing the fundamentally circulatory nature of language and ideas. The quoting subject is never a neutral transmitter; repetition inevitably transforms meaning, turning citation into appropriation and, eventually, invention. Over time, borrowed sentences become internalised, rearticulated, and detached from identifiable origins, dissolving stable notions of authorship and ownership. Situating Homo citans within contemporary media systems, attention economies, and abstract forms of power, the article demonstrates how quotation functions simultaneously as ethical practice, cognitive necessity, and political mechanism. Against the modern myth of originality, Homo citans exposes thought itself as an iterative process in which humans endlessly quote, modify, and reproduce themselves through language.

This article develops a theoretical bridge between the concept of ‘slopaganda’ and Peter Ayolov’s Propaganda 2.1 and Kayfabe Politics, arguing that generative AI has not merely accelerated misinformation but has industrialised a political economy of communication in which content is produced by inertia rather than intention. Drawing on Michał Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, and Amir Ebrahimi Fard’s analysis of slopaganda, the argument reframes ‘AI slop’ as epistemic pollution within an attention economy whose primary output is not persuasion but managed affect, especially anger and moral injury. In Propaganda 2.1, ‘openly implausible claims’ function less as propositions aimed at belief and more as performative signals that test loyalty, harden group identity, and keep the outrage engine turning. The article proposes that the crucial shift is not from truth to falsehood, but from argument to automaticity: the media system becomes an inertia-production apparatus that can manufacture dissent and consent at once, because generative systems can produce instant textual ‘reality’ for every taste, and can do so at the scale, scope, and speed required by platform monetisation. The conclusion outlines how this fusion of slopaganda and kayfabe politics restructures public reasoning into a continuous loop of exposure, reaction, correction, and recommodification, and it sketches institutional and regulatory implications of treating affective manipulation as a core political-economic variable rather than a side-effect. The conceptual framework developed in this article is closely aligned with and substantially informed by Peter Ayolov’s broader body of work on media power, political communication, and the economic organisation of public discourse. Across his books and articles published between 2023 and 2026, Ayolov advances a consistent thesis: contemporary mass communication operates less as a space of persuasion or deliberation and more as an automated industrial system driven by monetisation imperatives, affective extraction, and structural inertia.

The Media Scenario, Scriptwriting for Journalists explores how contemporary reality is no longer merely represented by media, but actively structured through narrative, scenario, and participation. Moving across media theory, political communication, game studies, storytelling, and digital culture, the book argues that modern societies no longer live inside grand ideologies or stable narratives, but inside continuously updated scenarios — playable structures that organise attention, behaviour, identity, and power. From propaganda and strategic communication to immersive storytelling, role-playing, conspiracy cultures, and the Metaverse, the book traces a historical shift: from spectatorship to participation, from message to environment, from persuasion to gameplay. Media no longer speaks to audiences; it builds worlds around them. Citizens become players, users become characters, and public life unfolds as a series of interactive dramaturgies. Drawing on thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Alasdair MacIntyre, Frank Rose, Jane McGonigal, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and contemporary media theory, The Media Scenario examines how power now operates less through commands and truths, and more through architectures of experience. It shows how strategic narratives, future scenarios, outrage cycles, immersive worlds, and gamified platforms reshape politics, ethics, education, and identity. Rather than offering technical manuals or moral panic, the book provides a conceptual map for understanding a world in which stories have become environments, fiction has become infrastructure, and reality itself is increasingly lived as a scenario. The central question is not whether this transformation is good or bad, but how it works — and how it might still be navigated with awareness, responsibility, and critical imagination.

Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger examines how anger has become one of the dominant organising forces of contemporary moral and political life. Rather than treating outrage as an emotional excess, a media pathology, or a democratic failure, the book argues that moral anger is a structural condition of morality itself. Wherever moral boundaries exist, anger emerges as the mechanism through which violations are detected, communicated, and sanctioned. In digital societies, this function has been absorbed into networked communication systems that amplify, stabilise, and monetise outrage. The book develops the concept of moral outrage networks to describe how platforms, institutions, and publics co-produce continuous cycles of moral accusation and response. Drawing on moral psychology, sociology, media theory, and political philosophy, it shows how moral disagreement increasingly takes the form of permanent indignation rather than deliberation. Moral outrage networks do not merely reflect conflict over values; they actively organise political identities, attention economies, and symbolic power. Through a genealogy of anger across historical media regimes, the book traces how moral emotions were once embedded in local communities and institutions, and how digital infrastructures have transformed anger into an always-on, scalable resource. It analyses algorithmic amplification, outrage exploitation, and contemporary propaganda models, demonstrating how moral emotions are operationalised within platform capitalism. The final sections confront the ethical paradox at the heart of digital moral life. If anger is necessary for morality to exist at all, how can it be restrained without undermining moral vigilance itself? The book does not offer prescriptions for eliminating outrage, but instead clarifies the conditions under which moral anger retains its critical function, and the conditions under which it becomes self-reinforcing, corrosive, or nihilistic. In doing so, it provides a sociological framework for understanding polarisation, media distrust, and the transformation of moral authority in networked societies.

This book explores the distortion of communication online, centered around the theory that the economic policy model of online media is primarily based on the systematic manufacture of dissent. Following the media criticism tradition of Habermas and Chomsky, among others, the book shows how anger can motivate news consumption as the principle of divide-and-rule in the online media of the 21st century is systematically applied. The author posits that media addiction increases interest, therefore deliberate distortion of facts and the manufacture of dissent provide the media with a larger audience and this becomes the business model. This insightful volume will interest researchers, scholars, and students of media economics, political economy of media, digital media, propaganda, mass communication, and media literacy.

This article brings into dialogue Michel Foucault’s 1981–1982 Collège de France lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject and his 1984 course The Courage of Truth with Rick Roderick’s Self Under Siege lectures, in order to reframe the contemporary crisis of subjectivity as a linguistic problem. Foucault’s recovery of epimeleia heautou as a practical, ethical relationship to truth is contrasted with the modern reduction of subjectivity to gnothi seauton, where the self becomes an object of knowledge rather than a practice of transformation. Roderick’s account of the late-modern self describes a condition of radical deflation, in which truth is stripped of ontological weight and the subject is dissolved into discursive fragments, simulations, and performative identities. By synthesising these two trajectories, the article argues that the collapse of the self is not merely ethical or metaphysical but metalinguistic: the self survives only as a grammatical effect, a reflexive function generated by language speaking about itself. The disappearance of care of the self thus coincides with the hypertrophy of the language of the self, producing a subject that is endlessly described yet no longer lived. The article concludes that a renewed ethics of self-care may require not a richer vocabulary of identity, but a partial suspension of the language of the self itself, recovering practices of silence, askēsis, and non-discursive truth that resist the deflationary grammar of late modernity. Does the disappearance of epimeleia heautou mark the moment when Western culture became trapped in the infinite regress of gnothi seauton, mistaking self-knowledge for self-cultivation? Have centuries of attempting to ‘know oneself’ been lost in spirals of self-reference, deferral of meaning, and aporia because the self does not exist as a substance but only as a practice requiring constant cultivation? Is the contemporary crisis of subjectivity therefore not a loss of identity but a loss of care, in which language proliferates while life withers? Can the self be understood only as something alive, in flux, and irreducibly temporal, graspable not as an object but as a movement across different phases of existence? And, like the riddle of the Sphinx, is the self always different in different times, places, and conditions, such that any attempt to fix it conceptually already betrays its living truth? A self that is only spoken about is already under siege, for care begins where grammar falls silent. When askēsis is replaced by algorithms and ‘know thyself’ becomes a slogan, the soul forgets how to stay alive.