“Ronson’s new book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” digs into a strange phenomenon of the participatory Internet. From time to time, it seems as if every user of social media rises up as one to denounce, shame and remove an apparently deserving victim. The first few times Ronson witnessed this, he was intrigued — even exhilarated. “When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool,” he writes of his initial reaction: “The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice.” Or was it? His view turned gradually darker…
Public shamings are often described in this book in terms of physical violence… It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street. The actual beating is — surprise! — exponentially worse. Eliding any difference between words and deeds may seem natural to a non-American like Ronson (many European nations have laws against hate speech), but it makes the continuing argument in this country about how to handle offensive language more challenging…
What are the actual stakes of shaming? Lurking and somewhat underdocumented in the tales gathered here is the fact that as agonizing as these experiences are, men often survive them just fine. Of the 69 people arrested in a Kennebunk, Maine, prostitution sting, Ronson points out, it was the lone female client who was mocked in town…
the actual problem with the Internet isn’t us hastily tweeting off about foolish people. The actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar Internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats.”
Yes. I have heard so, so many interviews/excerpts from this book on various podcasts (Jon Ronson is super well connected with the NPR and NPR-diaspora podcasting world), and this is my major concern with the perspective. Or, really, the fact that it’s a white man who is writing this book. I have super complicated feelings about shaming, and I want to do a lot more reading and thinking about it, but there is a lot of overlap with this narrative of sort of the nagging woman, the over-sensitive easily-angered black person, as a foil to the rational and distant white man.
There is a great deal of disambiguation that needs to take place between public shaming and online harassment, based on the person being targeted, the people doing the targeting, and the culture that feels threatened into action.
This is a great moment to be having those conversations, and I am sort of hopeful that we will start to come to better rules for online behavior – a better sense of the ‘why’ and a better sense of the impact, and a better sense of how a group can achieve an intention directly without shaming or harassment but with conversation and communication across barriers of perspective.
Related: Why we blame <add; from 4/22>>
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