Review: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

I have just read a fantastic book that I think should be required reading in all journalism—indeed, in all high school media—courses. I devoured [easyazon-link asin=”1594487138″ locale=”us”]So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed[/easyazon-link] by Jon Ronson in about two days, and have so many thoughts swirling in my head that I think I’ll need at least another week or two to process it.

The book came my way at an opportune time—following Monica Lewinsky’s surprisingly sympathetic Vanity Fair piece awhile back. She got herself a TED talk which has been making the rounds on the blogosphere this week. It seems she is reinventing herself as a speaker on cyber-bullying issues. And reinventing herself as a good one, at that. I can see people booking—and paying—for talks like the TED talk one. I hope she succeeds. I am rooting for her.

I just wish she’d done all of this before Ronson had written his book. I would have loved to hear his take on her. Ronson both looks back to the past to chronicle the history of public shaming (the pillories in the public square, for instance) and the evolution of social media as the modern form of it. He profiles people such as Justine Sacco (who tweeted a racist, but not sincerely meant joke and found her life ruined) and a man whose fairly tame under-the-breath joke about ‘dongles’ at a tech conference got both himself and the tweeter of it fired.

Ronson is interested on both why the public shakings happen, and how people do—or don’t—recover from them. He likens social media to the shiny new gun that the baby, who does not understand its danger, is drawn toward. Lewinsky believes we need more compassion on-line. Ronson believes we need more forgiveness. And he points out that women seem to be overwhelmingly worse-affected than men. In the Donglegate story, the man finds a job after. The woman who outed him, and got shamed for getting a father-of-three fired, has not. And then compare the public images of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky…

Ronson does concede that sometimes journalists do have an important role in outing those who have done misdeeds, so as to right a wrong or prevent further injustice. But he cautions against the kind of pile-on that Justine Sacco got, with her whole life destroyed for one tasteless joke. I’m with him on that one. And I am with Monica Lewinsky too. Who amongst us never did anything stupid at 22? That she is only now starting to get her life back, and at that only doing it by incorporating that one infamous act into the narrative and drawing herself as Patient Zero in the era of online shaming—is sad.