The Art of Ragebait

Ragebait. You've seen it everywhere, it's probably even happened to you once. Whenever I'm talking to my friends, maybe asking them about plans or just trying to figure something out, they always decide that it's funny to ragebait. If I ask them something as simple as "Yo what are you doing today," they will keep saying "huh" until I keep repeating it louder and louder until I finally realize that they are just playing with me. Although this gets annoying, it's come to a point where I will recognize it as soon as they do it. This has led me to connect it back to the piece we read this week—Words Don't Mean What They Mean.

In this piece Pinker states how when people communicate, they are doing 2 different things, delivering a message and negotiating a relationship. While the ragebait seemed pretty surface level to me, after reading this piece this week it showed me something different. This means that everytime when my friends keep responding with “huh,” they are doing 2 different things. They want me to repeat myself but they are also withdrawing themselves from the conversation in some way. Whenever they keep saying “huh” they seem almost uninterested in what I'm asking them, I realized every time they responded with that, they're always on their phones checking themselves out or just watching tiktoks while I ask them a question.

This made me realize that in this day and age, actually paying attention to what someone is saying has become more scarce than ever, when everyone is focused on a million different things at once it's hard to focus on what someone is saying. 

Anyways after writing this blog and reading it back I realized that sometimes I do this a lot. So yeah, maybe the person I was writing this whole blog about was me this whole time.