BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.