In an afterword to his 2015 book, Jon Ronson reported that
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was not
the first-draft title.
Indeed, it must have been a struggle to name this wide-ranging
volume.
Ronson explores shame in many contexts, from the woman whose off-color joke about AIDS on
Twitter “blew up [her] life” (as the
N.Y.
Times put it) to the clients of a busted prostitution outfit, to the
featured participant in “a German-themed BDSM orgy” (as the
New
Statesman put it).
I’m not here
naming the Twitter woman, because if you read the book, I think you’ll agree
she’s been named—and shamed—more than enough.
By Ronson’s broad definition of public shaming,
I’ve been there.
Ronson does little to distinguish those who fairly
earned some degree of public shaming—such as a journalist who made up quotes—from
those who were disproportionately rebuked, or just misunderstood, or falsely
maligned.
Ronson’s light touch with judgment—he
admits he has not always been so evenhanded in his own social media life—frustrated
me at first, as I’m one who likes to see justice done, or at least to wring my
hands when it’s not.
However, I came to
appreciate Ronson’s approach.
His
reluctance to reach normative conclusions forced me, as reader, to acknowledge my
own.
Do I really know how
This American Life fact-checks,
say,
David
Rakoff, versus
Mike
Daisey (
see “Retraction”)?
Do I need to have an opinion at all on what consenting
adults do in their sex dungeon? (
See also extended adventures with Jon Ronson in the porn world at his 2017 podcast,
The Butterfly Effect, coming to iTunes free in November.)
Judgment would get in the way of Ronson’s search.
Chapter to chapter, Ronson leads us in a
dogged effort to understand the shaming mob.
(
Cf. the
excellent work of Prof. Ken
Westhues on mobbing.)
When does the mob spring
into action, and when does it not?
Ronson
tells stories of public shamings from the perspectives of the victims.
He went to the trouble of tracking them all
down to get their stories; the Internet doesn’t usually bother.
(In my experience, neither does
The New York Times, nor even
a respectable author.)
Can the victim do anything to fight back
against a public shaming?
Ronson gives
us a fascinating glimpse into the sometimes shady world of online reputation
management.
And ultimately:
Is there
such a thing as redemption in the Internet age?
That was the question that kept me
turning pages.
Coverage of Ronson’s book
since 2015 really obsessed on the implications of social media, but this book
is about so much more than that.
Despite
my ongoing research into online erasure, or “the right to be forgotten” (
e.g.,
here and
here, and an exciting panel
discussion at NCA
2016, reported
here and
here), I was surprised to see Ronson make the connection.
He considers the RTBF later in the book,
tackling the conflicted feelings about RTBF that a lot of people in the
journalism world have over interacting rights to expression, privacy, and identity.
I continue to be captivated by the
redemption problem, which I wrote about in
a Washington Post opinion column some
years ago.
I won’t tell where Ronson’s
search leads, because that would spoil the fun.
Suffice to say, there’s plenty of work yet to do, if justice is really our aim.
No interest in soccer ('football' in most of the world) is prerequisite to the read. Dorsey himself acknowledges in the book's introduction that soccer was 'a journey into the unknown' for him, and—though he is co-director of the Institute for Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg—he disavows personal fandom. Rather Dorsey analogizes soccer, 'the world's most global cultural practice', to a 'prism'. Just as a prism separates white light into its constituent colours, Dorsey's study of soccer disentwines the modern Middle East into 'sport, society, culture, politics and development'....
