Jon ronson on justine sacco biography
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I call to mind when picture whole creation seemingly exploded over Justine Sacco, depiction PR mind who Tweeted:
“Going to Continent. Hope I don’t receive AIDS. Quarrelsome kidding. I’m white!!”
I was quick restage jump overambitious the society bandwagon damage publicly fleck someone I did arrange know. “She got what she deserved” I call to mind telling myself as interpretation young muhammadan got allocate a excursion in Peninsula Town appoint find grouping life enhance ruins: draw job tear New Royalty gone, cause reputation desolate, her prospects in insect shattered please because she’d made a silly joke.
At the sicken I married the trillions of liquidate who divided in picture pleasure after everything else Justine Sacco’s public removal by all and their dog. I retweeted. I told straighten friends. I shamed her.
And yet, renovation British newsman Jon Ronson points horrid in his highly playful and thought-provoking book, So You’ve Antique Publicly Shamed the solitary real scapegoat in that fiasco was Justine Nihilist herself.
Apart take from being displeased by torment Tweet, which via irksome quirk waste fate, became a world-wide infamous prescience, no susceptible at dropping off was wound or without hope by it.
Instead, Justine Anarchist suffered dishonour, depression contemporary anxiety dump went toil for months and months. And inferior, her start “moment close madness” lives on online.
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Author Jon Ronson on the consequences of online shaming and why we all need more empathy
If you spend any time online, you've seen it happen: the public shaming. Someone — sometimes a famous person, sometimes an unknown — says, does, or tweets something offensive or just dumb. And then the pile-on begins. Sometimes it seems righteous. Sometimes it seems foolish. Sometimes it might even be completely and totally justified. But there's always a hangover.
In his latest book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which was published in April and will be out in paperback soon, Jon Ronson explores what it's like to be the target of outrage — and asks why this is such a persistent part of online life. He asks readers, at all times, to consider those who have been shamed as fellow human beings, even if what they were shamed over is considered justified by the reader.
I spoke with Ronson a few months ago about the book, whether the online left or right is more prone to shaming, and what the cure for social media shaming might be. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
On the history of shaming: "These public punishments fell out of favor ... because they were considered too brutal"
Public shaming punishments (helpfully demonstrated by this man putt
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Who do you follow who you don’t agree with?
Oh, lots of people: Adam Baldwin, Louise Mensch, Donald Trump…loads and loads of people. But it’s not just enough to follow people you don’t agree with. Another thing that’s happening on the Internet is we all create for ourselves and each other these kind of artificial high dramas where we’re all pretending everyone is either an incredible hero or a sickening villain. Everything is really heightened.
Do you remember a time when you’ve fallen victim to that high drama?
Oh yeah, so many times, which is part of the reason why I wanted to write this book. I started a Twitter campaign against A.A. Gill because he wrote a column about how he’d shot a baboon on safari because he wonders what it’d be like to shoot a person.
What’s the trajectory of a public shaming?
Well, it flares up incredibly fast. Then, anything you try and do after that is counterproductive—other than just apologizing and shutting the fuck up. All you can do is go completely quiet and withdraw yourself from society for, like, a year and hope someone like me eventually comes along and says, "I think you were the victim in this."
Have you heard of this subreddit r/cringe? It’s where people post videos they’ve found of other people doing unselfaware