So You've Been Publicly Shamed

I read this book in less than 24 hours, which is VERY rare for me these days. If you have, or are currently enduring public shaming I can recommend this book. It will enlighten you, and may even bring a certain amount of comfort. It will be different for everyone of course but victims of all kinds should find something of worth to take away with them. It is written in an easy to read non academic way. I am about to start re-reading it straight away.Interestingly I Googled Lindsey Stone and the Arlington photo incident came top in the results. The internet never forgets, but it's important to give people a break and at least try and get a true understanding of what happened. We are all just one click or tap from destruction.If you are currently going through this, you have my deepest empathy and sympathy.

Review originally published here: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2016/01/review-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed-jon-ronson.htmlThe Internet terrifies me. Through writing Girl with her Head in a Book, I have carved a tiny corner of it that makes sense to me and I enjoy it hugely but I am painfully aware of how misbehaviour online - however unintentional - can carry a heavy penalty. I have a tendency to disclose early on to my employers that I have a website so that I am absolutely sure that this is ok. Back when I was a teacher, I was really afraid that one day the site would be 'Found' by a parent or pupil and that I would have to give it up. The creative experience is hugely important to me and the idea of losing it was horrifying. We are all vulnerable to Internet shaming - a Tweet taken out of context, a Facebook photo taken the wrong way, a news story shared to the wrong people - the world has become a great deal smaller and the days of the lynch mob are back. In this book, Jon Ronson explores what happens to those people caught out online as well as analysing what shame truly means in the modern age. I had previously read The Psychopath Test, which left me sitting nervously, worried lest I was in fact one too and I finished this book with a similar sense of unease; as Ronson points out repeatedly however, the enemy here is not a remote figure sitting in a fancy office - the enemy is us.jon ronsonJon Ronson was first drawn to the subject when a group of academics built a spambot of him on Twitter and refused to take it down, then he managed to successfully Internet shame them into doing so. Interested by the power of this, Ronson decided to investigate further. He charts 'the history' of Internet shamings, going back to how Jan Moir covered the death of Boyzone member Stephen Gateley, an event that seems comparatively quaint in contrast to the more recent examples. I was surprised that he did not mention the coverage of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand's voicemail messages on Andrew Sachs' phone but there have been such a deluge over recent years that it is hardly surprising that he left some out. While some of the people featured in this book have faded from my memory - disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer, a disability support worker who posted an inappropriate photo on Facebook (I'm not writing her name as I don't want to add to the Google rankings in any way), the playwright Mike Daisey who lied - there were a good deal of others who were familiar. Except not quite because I remembered them for their scandal rather than their actual name. Indeed, by participating with this book, they were undertaking an act of bravery by reminding the public of their names and that yes, they were the person who told that lie, made that off-colour joke, posed in that photo. The only reason why people could possibly agree to sign up for this is out of a sense of outrage of what had befallen them. It is not fair that someone should lose their job due to the pressure from an anonymous lynch mob which has not bothered to acquaint itself with the true particulars of a situation.Ronson refers vaguely to differentiating between when a shaming is appropriate or not - the Jan Moir example is held up as righteous, while the incident when two men were shamed for making a joke about Dongles at a conference is referenced as not being so. Yet both incidents show evidence of a mob mentality out of control - a delight in another's shame. None of this is exactly new, as Ronson admits himself. In centuries past, people were branded, flogged, pilloried in the stocks, but then these were recognised as inhumane punishments with little chance of rehabilitating the offender. The Internet has brought this all back. Even as Ronson goes to visit a judge who regularly dealt out judicial punishments invoking shame, he realises that there is an added viciousness to the Internet lynch mob.The thing that always disturbs me is how when women are being shamed, the threats so quickly turn towards rape. The Internet appears to have the ability to rouse some very primeval levels of rage amongst some people and the anger at a woman expressing an opinion, speaking up for herself or others, having a view on issue - it reveals a frightening amount of misogyny. This was an issue that I wished Ronson had tried to analyse more - the furthest he got was considering that it represented an attack against a woman's femininity, to bring her to shame as a very woman, but even so, it felt under-developed. Is the act of rape the most shameful thing that can be inflicted on a woman? Are we seeking an ultimate victory over the 'target' by bringing them to their very lowest, and the best low point for a woman is that? Or is there a sexual release to these remote shamings - they would not rape them in real life, but in the cyber world, anything goes? I'm not sure.The emotion of shame itself is a very particular one. Painful events in my past (the deaths of loved ones, relationships or friendships which ended) do ultimately fade into scars from which I learn but am no longer traumatised by. Incidents which provoke shame have a tendency to remain fresh in the mind. Ronson analyses shame within the prison system, how offenders almost always have events involving shame in their past (abuse, bullying, etc) and how when prisons focused on dealing with resolving these feelings, the reoffending rates dropped dramatically. There are so many fascinating ideas explored in this book, such as how the increase in stop and frisk policing means that young people are being driven away from hanging out on the street, and thus are drawn to hanging out online - thus groups such as 4chan and Anonymous represent their attempts to regain control in a world that is attempting to regulate their behaviour. None of these theories are necessarily conclusive but they are very interesting.Ronson spent three years visiting those who have been shamed, repeatedly checking in with people on their journey as they sought to rebuild. There is an agony as he charts Jonah Lehrer's attempts to rehabilitate his reputation, particularly uncomfortable as Lehrer gives his return speech next to a live Twitter feed charting people's reactions, which are unfortunately rather predictably hostile. Some of it feels remarkably academic as Ronson sits with Max Moseley and wonders how Moseley was able to escape apparently scot-free from being outed as an orgy enthusiast (although his wife was none too happy about it) - the answer seemed to be that he just refused to engage with it as shaming. Other times it all feels a bit unfair such as in the case of Justine Sacco, the woman who made the tweet about Aids before boarding a flight. As Ronson points out, a mere few moments of reflection tell you that the Tweet was perhaps not very funny but it wasn't intentionally racist, but yet the whole Internet still catches fire. And this leaves one unwilling to speak out for her since the last thing anybody wants is a share of the ignominy.Another person I was very surprised did not merit an appearance in So You've Been Publicly Shamed was Katie Hopkins. She markets herself on shame, or rather on people trying to shame her. Stories about her are repeatedly going viral as people express their outrage. Katie Hopkins has described fleeing refugees as cockroaches, she has explained how she judges small children based on their names, that she believes fat people bring it all on themselves, that people with dementia deserve to be involuntarily euthanised - and yet she still has a job. The very fact that she generates vitriol is what keeps her employed. She earns a living deliberately doing what the people in this book did entirely by accident. Why does she away with it? What makes her so immune to shame? Still, I imagine that the bespectacled and faux-naive Jon Ronson would have struggled to hold his own in a conversation with her.Ronson definitely does have a schtick which he has down fairly pat - despite his insistence that he is nerdy and socially-awkward, it is clear that he is actually a very astute and thorough journalist. A particularly amusing incidence of this occurs when he finds himself on a porn set, attempting to overcome how adult films treat shame, but many of the actors and directors take the time to check that Ronson is coping ok with the rather extreme environment, rubbing his arm and asking him politely if he is all right. I have been following Ronson's journalism for years (I only realised how long when he mentioned in this book that his son is now seventeen - the time really has flown) and while he may want to insist on his own ordinariness, it does start to feel like false modesty after a while. His book is compulsively readable, flows very easily and covers the issue with deceptive thoroughness without ever feeling overly heavy. This feels like essential reading for the electronic age.With the help of Google, people find it incredibly difficult to escape their digital history - even with the recent legislation around The Right To Be Forgotten, stories still linger. I really felt for the young woman who was publicly shamed for a photograph, barely left the house for a year and then when she finally found employment again, she lived in fear lest her past come out. As part of the book, Ronson signed her up pro bono with a reputation management company, who basically flooded the Internet with banal content in an attempt to drive the coverage about the photo down Google into the oblivion of the third page. There is such a sadness to this though; the great thing about the Internet is the opportunities for discussion and information exchange, but if we have to live in a world where the only safe things to post about are cats, recipe ideas and meaningless faux-inspirational quotes, we are being driven by fear into silence. That which is positive about the Internet will be lost.I myself handle my Twitter account with extreme care - topics almost exclusively touch on this website or BBC's The Archers, but even in that instance I worried myself that someone might taken it the wrong way when I declared that Rob Titchener needed to die a grisly death (he is fictional and definitely deserves it). I remember once commenting that I thought that Lorraine Kelly had conducted her interview of Amanda Knox very poorly and then was horrified when the Anti-Knox brigade started sending hatred my way. My point had not hinged on Knox's guilt or otherwise, but rather that it was inappropriate for Kelly to speak in such an accusatory way to someone who had been cleared on all charges and that demanding to know why Knox was trying to sell a book about her experience seemed foolish when her family was known to have incurred serious financial hardship in attempting to defend her. Lorraine Kelly had been unprofessional - that was the beginning and end of what I had to say but suddenly Twitter turned hostile. I have never treated it the same way since.Apparently innocent topics have the potential to turn unpleasant - I wouldn't even Tweet that I thought Richard III was guilty as I don't want the Philippa Langleys of this world to turn on me, I definitely don't Tweet about the news any more. I could sense Ronson's own unease throughout the book, as he cited his sources repeatedly, clearly concerned about similar experiences to Jonah Lehrer who was caught out with self-plagiarism and fabricating quotes. Interestingly, the bonus chapter in the paperback edition that I read revealed that Ronson was also the target of a mini-shaming campaign over a comparison he made between the rape threats and getting someone fired - this passage was in fact cut from the first draft of the book but someone unearthed it and got angry. The nightmare about being naked in the middle of school/work/any public place may be unlikely to take place but the one where you get pilloried on the Internet is frighteningly possible. I don't think that So You've Been Publicly Shamed made me any more afraid than I was before, but it definitely shone a greater light into the process and the motivations behind the people doing this. The problem is though that there can be no happy resolution since the people doing it is us.

This is an excellent book about witch trials on social media and the ad hominem attacks on those expressing a counter-orthodox view or making a badly phrased jokette via electronic media.From personal experience, I can say that the points raised also apply to reviews on Amazon.Last year I wrote a review of Eric Clapton on Amazon that mentioned the following factsa) Clapton made protracted and extremely racist speech on a public stage in the 1970s that he has never recanted or apologised for.b) Clapton had played a recent London gig that was attended by members of the undemocratic North Korean ruling elite- who received VIP treatment from the promoter.This resulted in personal abuse posted on Amazon against myself, my wife, my family and my surname. Foolishly I replied that Clapton’s racist rant was ironic given that he had made millions from surfing waves of black music. Subsequently I was accused of being; an ignorant liar, a deluded Tory, a fellating Communist , a lesbian who secretly wants to bed Mr Slowhand, a Bieber fan, a black racist, a pinko , a politically correct fun crusher and so on. One immature troll riffed repeatedly that in his locality, ‘Root’ is a euphemism for the male member - and subsequently got all of his adolescent work colleagues to gang up post so-called ‘reviews’ reminding me of this teenage regional colloquialism.I posted a reply suggesting that all too often, music (and other) fans looking at reviews could not take criticism of their golden calf idols and were only looking for confirmation of their pre-existing tastes and beliefs- but this only intensified the cyber bullying from Mr Clapton’s legions of crusaders. Many of the Salem mob demanded and insisted that Amazon should remove my review because it was not the familiar track- by- track hagiography of the fretwork and pyrotechnics that they were seeking.In the end, I deleted the review myself.I was reminded of this when reading page 267 (paperback edition) when I saw the following brilliant quote from Adam Curtis about social media“The tech utopians like the people in Wired present this as a new kind of democracy. It isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. Twitter passes lots of information around. But it tends to be the kind of information that people know that others in their particular network will like. So 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 in. They tend to get squeezed out. When somebody says something or does something that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system, the other parts react furiously and try to reject that destabilizing fragment and regain stability. And so that other people who have other ideas are marginalised in our lives’Reading this passage, I felt guilty about succumbing to cyber bullying and censoring my own posting to secure a quiet life. The innate conservatism of social media is structurally reinforced on any electronic page reviewing a product. This is because the only people looking at the page are the mildly curious potential purchasers or the existing fan base looking for confirmation of their tastes and values.Foolishly assuming the Clapton fans were the only ones prone to witch hunts, I subsequently posted a rather witty review that mentioned that in a legal case, a Radio One breakfast DJ was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a girl with special needs. In the trial, it was alleged that said DJ could only achieve tumescence via playing the popular music of a certain beat group at high volume on his luxury hi-fi system. A television programme was even broadcast about the alleged victim.Imagine my surprise when I had to face the wrath of ICICLE WORKS fans. Faced with their claret vengeance, I had to delete the review. Although ‘Love is a Wonderful Colour’, fans of ‘the Works’ do not wish to be reminded of the colourful case of Blue Tulip Rose Read or (as with all fanatics) they cannot face anything that challenges their cannon of musical or cultural shibboleths. To conclude; as with all social media, most Amazon reviews of cultural products are indeed nothing more than mutual grooming that secure clicks of approval. When you write reviews on Amazon, do not knock over any statues. Otherwise you will be pestered by an earnest stalker electronically informing you that; a) somewhere in the world, your surname is a euphemism for an item of genitalia, b) by the way, IMHO, your marital partner is a source of milk, LOL. And c) you are a pooh stripe and we know which primary school your kids go to.As an experiment, try writing a critical review of a treasured music ‘legend’ or similar and wait for the bronze salty bile to head your way. Try a review of Queen that points to albums choc full of filler tracks and mentions Freddie’s dwarf abuse at the well-documented 80’s Ibiza parties. Or, suggest that The Who have not made a good record since the sixties and ask when Mr Pete Townsend is going to publish the academic book on paedophilia that he was caught ‘researching’. Alternatively, suggest that the very last Bowie album is an over-rated imitation of the latter work of Scott Walker as sung by a Swiss tax exile, or that H.I.M. Robert Nesta Marley recorded a few duff tracks (including ‘What’s New Pussycat’) and was not exactly kind to the women in his life. You may just get clicks indicating that you review is ‘not useful’. But I doubt it…You too can be JUSTINE SACCO.I would like to add that this book is rushed and rather bitty and lacks the coherence of his other work- but this is more than made up for by the debunking of Le Bon (not THAT one) and Zimbardo. But I’d hate to face the wrath of the Jon Ronson fans. So I won’t.

Absolutely brilliant.

Si eres usuario de redes sociales, aunque sea un usuario poco frecuente, debes de leer este libro.Utilizando ejemplos de la vida real y entrevistas con los protagonistas (¿sobrevivientes?) de éstas, 'So You've Been Publicly Shamed' describe cómo a través de una red social podemos ser juez y verdugo desde la comodidad de nuestro hogar, lugar de trabajo o smartphone, sin tener todas las visibilidad de la situación. También explica las consecuencias que pueden tener nuestros Likes, Comentarios o Shares. El caso de Justine Sacco -googlenlo si no lo conocen- es quizá el más ilustrativo.

Today, it is very easy to reach the entire world via social media. Which means, it is all too easy to publicly shame someone. Jon Ronson exposes and highlights this problem, and how this affects people’s lives. A must read; it is everyone’s responsibility to make the world a nicer and gentler place.

In depth analysis of how social media interactions affect our behavior. It makes conscious of what we post on fb

For the first time writing an Amazon review I looked at the rating and noticed the words beside it: "Posted publicly as Richard Schwindt". Then I thought, "What will people think?" I have written many reviews and many books; most importantly for our purposes here, two on workplace mobbing. Every day I hear from people who were mobbed at work and sometimes in communities, congregations or peer groups. I always enjoy Jon Ronson's curiously breezy and curious prose about serious and complex subjects. And I marvel how he goes right to the source of the subject, treating topics that would elicit earnest exposition from most other journalists as something of a lark. This book was a must read for me and I came away impressed. He has as always gone right to the heart of the subject; tracking and recording the words of people who had been shamed, shunned and humilated on a grand scale. He asks about the impact of public shaming - mob action - on the targets, those who pile on and the larger impact on society. Is our ability to humiliate an individual on the grand tableau of the internet "democratization" or is it a force for conformity, stifling creativity and difference? Is there a growing formum for unhealthy righteousness that will drive real discussion underground by allowing silly or mildly offensive remarks to destroy people? These are questions we should all be worrying about. In the end - and this is Ronson's real strength - everyone interviewed turns out to be a thinking feeling human being, even those who have been reviled by millions. Some of them had been seriously offensive; some just silly but called out. Either way, the public opprobrium was the same. This is an important book and should be read by anyone interested in freedom of expression, human foolishness and students of social change and cohesion.