Jon Ronson: ‘We’ve fallen in love with online shaming’
Writer Jon Ronson tells Jon Snow people get torn apart on the internet, just for telling a joke “that landed badly”. But can online shaming bring about positive social change?
Author Jon Ronson’s latest book investigates the murky world of online shaming by interviewing some of its victims. He is concerned we have “fallen in love” with gathering together online to shame others, without any thought about the impact on the person enduring the avalanche of abuse.
He argues in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, that normal people are having their lives destroyed by the pack mentality of social media shaming, where punishment for a bad-taste joke far outweighs the offensiveness of the joke.
And his conclusion? “When you’ve had a proper shaming, the terrible, counter-intuitive thing to do is to stay absolutely silent.”
By contrast, author and professor Jennifer Jacquet disagrees that public shaming is bad thing. Her book, Is Shame Necessary?, maintains that shame is a powerful tool to bring about social change – and she advocates using it as a non-violent form of resistance against corrupt institutions, but not individuals.