If you have any kind of an online life, you might have felt change a-coming. A whiff of rage and growing collective fury. Social media has become the tool to power revolutions, the platform to call out big corporations on their dumping policies, the genesis for petitions to save everything—from stray dogs to heritage buildings, and a soapbox to generally vent on any topic that gets your goat. It’s in this particular zeitgeist, in the aftermath of#CecilGate, that I read journalist and screenplay writer Jon Ronson’s latest book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.
Ronson starts with a case of identity theft: that of his own. An imposter with a Twitter account starts saying unpleasant things about him. Ronson confronts and publicly shames the trolls into taking the account down. But when he sees the level of vitriol expressed against his perpetrators by the general public (Gas the c**ts…. Then piss on their corpses), it alarms him. Something is out of whack. He believes we’re at the start of a “great renaissance of public shaming,” and to explore the nature and repercussions of this phenomenon, he interviews various “shamees”—from disgraced New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer (who aside from plagiarising, also ascribed untrue quotes to Bob Dylan in his book Imagine), Justine Sacco of the infamous, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” tweet, and F1 boss Max Mosley’s S&M sex scandal.
Ronson is a humorous and perspicacious writer, able to see things from both sides of the firewall. He writes how dehumanising the act of shaming can be both for the shamers and the shamee, about the impossibility to move forward and recover because of the foreverness of the Internet. In the days before the courts of Twitter, public shaming offered the chance for empathy and societal change, but the anonymity of the Internet precludes any such niceties. He compares virtual lynching to a drone strike, “nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”
Ronson writes about mob madness and crowd theories, hauls himself to a shame eradication workshop in Chicago, and speaks with online reputation companies who try to trick Google’s algorithms. A few interesting trends emerge from all his findings. One: the Internet is misogynistic—a church of the Nazarine pastor can visit a prostitute and nobody cares, but a woman who gives the one-fingered salute at a sign in the Arlington cemetery can lose her job and receive rape threats. Two: our fury about the “terribleness of others,” while it may stem from a desire to do good, it has no particular hierarchy unlike Dante’s circles of hell; on the Internet, a bad sense of humour is on par with committing an actual crime. Finally: the best way to survive the Internet is to be bland.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a timely book that deserves a wide audience. “We have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with,” Ronson writes, because instead of the egalitarian widening that the Internet keeps promising, we are in fact narrowing our imaginations and ideas. “We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.”
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