They had it coming

Getty seems to “own” Frankenstein angry villager images, so here’s one from DALL-E

Author Jon Ronson knows a thing or two about public shaming. When a trio of “academics” hijacked his persona for an infomorph—basically an automated Twitter feed that spewed inane comments about food in his name—he took the fight to the internet, where the virtual hordes soon compelled the spambot authors to cease and desist. The experience hatched a thought: Once upon a time, if you wanted to participate in a good, old-fashioned public humiliation, you actually had to show up. But as with most everything else, the internet has made condemnation an exercise in crowdsourcing, with today’s angry mobs trading stockades and scarlet As for social media and its inherent anonymity.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is Ronson’s tour through a not-necessarily-brave new world where faceless commenters wield the power to destroy lives and careers, where the punishments often outweigh the crimes, and where there is no self-control and (ironically) no consequences. On one hand, part of what makes this book (again, ironically) so fun to read is a certain schadenfreude; it’s fun to read about others’ misfortunes, especially if we think they “had it coming.” Jonah Lehrer, whose admitted plagiarism and falsifications probably earned him his fall, stalks these pages. But so does Justine Sacco, whose ill-conceived tweet probably didn’t merit hers; as it turns out, the internet doesn’t always differentiate the misdemeanors from the felonies. But the best reason to read this is Ronson’s style, which is funny and brisk, yet informative and never condescending. Shamed is not a scholarly book, nor is it a workbook about navigating ignominy. It’s an entertaining investigation into a growing–and often disturbing–demimonde of uncharitable impulses run amok.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a selection for Amazon.com’s Best Books of the Month for April 2015. We asked Ronson for his thoughts on the book and social media’s role in the changing role of shame in public discourse.

When did you realize that public shaming would make an interesting topic for a book?

It began to dawn on me that we’d drifted into a new way of being. We were turning social media into a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where people were either magnificent heroes or sickening villains.

We’d pile in on someone – for some tiny transgression – and then happily carry on with our day. I suddenly realized that I had no idea whether our villains-of-the-day were okay or in ruins. I assumed they were okay, but what if they weren’t?

So I realized I needed to write an empathetic, humanist, funny, scary, tense, page-turner of a book that makes the reader feel what it feels like to be one of the transgressors.

You present modern shaming—with its technology based tools – as a kind of modern analog for communal techniques that once upheld the mores of society (and might occasionally be described as mob rule). Is this renaissance a good thing?

When the transgression is serious it’s a good thing. It’s wonderful that social media gives a voice to voiceless people. Together we fight injustice. But we’ve started to find it hard to differentiate between serious transgressions and unserious transgressions. We’re tearing people apart for lesser and lesser crimes. It’s robbing us of our empathy. It’s making us cold and hard. This book is a call for people to remember empathy.

Has social media changed human behavior, or has social media evolved to meet the impulses of humans?

I think the former. Social media is changing human behavior. Twitter is like a mutual approval machine.

My friend, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis put it beautifully to me:

“What you get is a kind of mutual grooming. One person sends on information that they know others will respond to in accepted ways. And then, in return, those others will like the person who gave them that piece of information. So information becomes a currency through which you buy friends and become accepted into the system. That makes it very difficult for bits of information that challenge the accepted views to get into the system. They tend to get squeezed out. I think the thing that proves my point dramatically are the waves of shaming that wash through social media – the thing you have spotted and describe so well in your book. It’s what happens when someone says something, or does something, that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system. The other parts react furiously and try to eject that destabilising fragment and regain stability.”