Has the internet made us vigilantes or just trolls?
What’s in it for you:
What’s it about?
Remember the woman who foolishly tweeted about gettings AIDs on her trip to Africa? She claimed to be sarcastic and making fun of racists. Tone is hard to read in text. Humor is hard to read in strangers. The internet rallied against her. She lost her job. She lost control of her image. Did she behave foolishly? Absolutely. Was the response appropriate? TBD.
In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson looks at a few similar instances where a single incident made popular online completely ruined someone’s life. He follows up with the protagonists of each public shaming. He educates us on the changes to internet shaming in the last decade.
Cultural Background:
This is us. We have so much power now. Some of it is great. We can call out true aggressors. They feel compelled to apologize and their business partners or bosses feel compelled to let them go. Others learn that this type of behavior is not acceptable. Some of it is scary. If we, the internet community, decide to go against someone, we can. And we aren’t all careful and discerning members.
What to Expect:
Jon Ronson takes us through the entire timelines of some of the most popular incidents of public shaming in the past decade. You’ll learn what to do if you ever get caught up in a situation where your reputation is misrepresented online. I personally hope this book makes us all take Uncle Ben’s message to heart. We have an immense amount of power. We should always try to represent things fairly. It seems small. But, sometimes a retweet can have a monumental impact on a person’s life.
What I got out of it:
Why this book?
Ronson makes any topic interesting. Plus, the effects of the internet/tech, in general, is fascinating. I’ve always liked hearing the other side of a story. The fact that these are all true incidents makes the book more intriguing. It’s easy to turn any person into a meme. But, we forget what kind of impact that has on their lives. Ronson brings us back to this.
What I Learned
I changed the way I behave online. It’s a great reminder to be thoughtful online and with most digital communication. It should not have surprised anyone that whatever accounts we have online are not ours.
On the opposite end of the interaction, the book as a whole provides a great reminder not to assume malice.
I learned about the Right to Be Forgotten Rule. To paraphrase from The Telegraph, it’s a law that allows people to have an imperfect past. It is currently upheld only in the EU and Argentina according to wiki. For a good read on the subject, check this piece out.
How does it work? If there is harmful information online, a person could submit a request to a search engine. The search engine would delist those results. It would then push the content further down, but not delete it.
After all…
Only creepy people check past the second page (of search results).
Guilty.
Quotes
“as soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.”
I reread Max’s email. Could that be it? Does a shaming only work if the shamee plays his or her part in it by feeling ashamed? There was no doubt that Jonah, and Justine too, had been having intense conversations with their shame. Whereas Max was just refusing to engage with his at all. I wondered: Was unashamedness something that some people just had? Or was it something that could be taught?
We all know the Eleanor Roosevelt quote about having agency over who gets to affect our feelings. Can this be the case with public shaming? I feel like the people who ignore accusations of sexual harassment seem to get away with it. Maybe the real victims of unfair shaming could too if they had the same confidence that their reputation would be maintained.
She was a New York City person. She was nervy and sassy and sort of debonair.
Accurate!
“I do think there’s lots to learn from porn stars about how not to be embarrassed or feel vulnerable,” he e-mailed back. He added that a lot of sex industry people go on to become hospice workers: “They’re not freaked out by the body, so they can help people transition through illness and death….”
What a fascinating fact to learn!
A psychologist once told me that if you’re worried you may be a sociopath that means you aren’t one.
Phew.
On the Internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.
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