So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Jon Ronson
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1594634017
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Now a New York Times bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.
'It's about the terror, isn't it?'
'The terror of what?' I said.
'The terror of being found out.'
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.
A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people's faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.
Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws - and the very scary part we all play in it.
Later, we talked again. I told her what Sam Biddle had said—about how she was “probably fine now.” I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib. He was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. Who would want to know? Whatever that pleasurable rush that overwhelms us is—group madness or something else—nobody wants to ruin it by facing the fact that it comes with a cost. “Well, I’m not fine,” Justine said. “I’m really suffering. I had a great career and I loved my job and
said, “the guy rich white assholes make jokes about. And so the issue with Justine Sacco is that she’s a rich white person who made a joke about black sick people who will die soon. So for a few hours, Justine Sacco got to find out what it feels like to be the little guy everyone makes fun of. Dragging down Justine Sacco felt like dragging down every rich white person who’s ever gotten away with making a racist joke because they could. She thought her black AIDS joke was funny because she doesn’t
thought of her now. “I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied. • • • Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the café at the San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained,” she said. “Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?” I was so taken aback by this suggestion that I didn’t say anything in defense of Hank at the time. But later I felt
knows that about Walmart!” But then she hesitated. The conference call was proving an unexpectedly melancholic experience. It was nothing to do with Farukh. He really felt for Lindsey and wanted to do a good job for her. The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the Internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities—to cats and ice cream and Top 40 chart music. We were creating a
2012’s “Imagine,” has left his post as a contributing editor at Wired for the New Yorker, where he’ll be a staff writer. In many ways, Lehrer is a younger, brain-centered version of Gladwell, making him a natural New Yorker fit. —CAROLYN KELLOGG, Los Angeles Times, JUNE 7, 2012 Jonah resigned from The New Yorker after seven weeks in the job, the day Michael’s article appeared. On the Sunday night before publication, Jonah had been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals