Someone tags you in a less than flattering picture on Facebook (that one after too many glasses of wine where your make up is smeared and your eyes are half closed).
Or you post a tweet that you afterwards instantly regret. You scramble around trying to untag yourself or delete the tweet but someone, somewhere out there, has already spotted it and you’ve been found out.
And you feel ashamed.
I got sent a proof copy of this book towards the end of last year by Pan Macmillan and it made for such fascinating reading.
Jon Ronson is a bestselling author who has spent the last three years travelling around the world interviewing “recipients of high profile public shamings”.
These people were just like you and me before they were shamed, ordinary people going about their lives but then they made a bad joke or did something wrong at work, and soon the whole world knew about it and their lives were ruined.
Public shamings are no new thing. In medieval times people used to view shamings as entertainment and they’d sit and enjoy a picnic while adulterers were whipped or painted with tar or otherwise ridiculed in full public view.
Nowadays we enjoy that picnic behind the safety of our computer screenings while we gang up mercilessly on someone who may have made a very easy mistake. People have been making mistakes for centuries but now these are laid bare for the entire world to see and to comment on.
Of course, getting tagged in a drunken photo is very different to the much more serious case of committing plagiarism for example, and then having the media and your peers and perfect strangers comment on your transgression and shame you.
But I’m using this example to indicate how easy it is for things to spiral completely out of control.
Ronson interviews a variety of interesting cases in the book, from journalists who may have written something untrue to the more well known case of Justine Sacco, the American PR director who tweeted on her way to South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”.
I’m sure you all heard about the Sacco case – the link above is adapted from Ronson’s book and makes for fascinating reading.
I won’t repeat the whole story but it certainly made me think twice about the incident and feel a small amount of sympathy for Justine, no matter how misguided her tweet was.
Reading the interview with her, she stated that the tweet was never meant to be taken literally and that she meant to be poking fun at herself, at someone who lived in America and who was so protected from the rest of the world’s problems.
She shouldn’t have done it in such a politically incorrect way or in a tone that could be viewed as overtly racist, but did she really deserve what she got? (workers at hotels she was staying at said “they couldn’t guarantee her safety”, she was fired from her job and she suffered from a deep depression).
I spend a lot of time on Twitter and as much as I love it, I find the bullying and the shaming deeply uncomfortable.
Everyone has an opinion on everything and people are much more righteous and outspoken than they would be in real life.
While I agree that these platforms do exist to call out bigots or racists and show them for what they are really are, I hate the gang mentality that can gather momentum so quickly on someone who may have just made an innocent mistake.
I was discussing this with a friend recently and we expressed how scary this public shaming is for our children, growing up in a world where social media is ubiquitous.
The truth is that the digital age makes it that much easier for their transgressions to become common knowledge. But surely mistakes are the only way we learn?
So as much as you want your kids to think very carefully before sharing or saying anything, they are going to make errors of judgement (as we all did and still do!) and you just hope they are never shamed as overtly as some of the examples in this book.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is fascinating, insightful and amusing and should be read by everyone, especially regular users of social media. It will make you think very carefully about what you post or share online but more importantly how you act towards others.
If we are “using shame as a form of social control” (as per the book description) we need to wield this weapon very carefully because people’s lives and happiness are at risk.
Read more reviews on Belinda’s Blog, Making Mountains.
Look out for an excerpt coming soon.
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