So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: A Micro Book Review
The book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (2015) is a seminal examination of the modern form of public shaming – namely, online shaming – which been made increasingly prominent by the expansion and intensification of social media culture.
Although the text is a little lightweight for my preferences, the writing is effective and revealing of its topic. Ronson’s documentary style approach that blends some philosophy into investigative interview is quite fitting here, particularly in introducing the world of online shaming. Shamed seems especially valuable in that it appears to be the first popular work to explore and assess the nature of online shaming in its social and personal effects.
Since the book is based on a broad variety of personal insights that are revealing of human nature and cultural conditions, I imagine that most would find interest in its content even if not particularly engaged with social media (ironically, it so happened that I only signed up to Twitter 𝕏 a few months after having read this book).
On the Book Notes
The notes featured in this post are composed from my extracted highlights of the book and consist largely of my paraphrases of the original text. However, I have also altered, elaborated, and added to Ronson’s details and points to represent what I considered to be the essential significance of each passage. Thus, instead of creating a notes summary of the book I’ve compiled its most substantial information such to enhance the reception of its significance.
Rather than ordering the notes chronologically and by chapter I’ve categorised them by the five main themes I perceived them to represent. These sections contain distinct paragraphs of one or more passages, each of which forms a central point and within which the key details are emboldened. Following the notes are links to various media related to Shamed that may enhance your understanding of the topic and appreciation of its social (and perhaps personal) relevance. Finally, I’ve included a PDF mini-book of my original extracts from which these notes were composed.
Grammatical Note: I’ve used double apostrophes to signify words used in the book (i.e. quotations) and single apostrophes to emphasise concepts that Ronson may or may not have referred to in that passage.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: Notes and Key Details by Theme
Social Media (Ritual) for ‘Social Justice’
Justice is no longer an end in itself but is a pretext to creating victim-to-victory narratives via social media that incite people to express outrage and demand ‘justice’.
Conceitedly, the collective involvement in the online shaming process attempts to mask a compulsion to revel in the symbolic execution of a designated villain—in the form of media-sanctioned vitriol that amounts to ritualised social sadism.
In the early days, social media shaming was a weapon that businesses didn’t know how to handle effectively, hence making them vulnerable to it. And whenever the “powerful” were judged by Social Media to have transgressed, people were eager to jump on the shaming bandwagon.
Public shame via social media seemed to be a powerful tool for the social rectification of justice—as if punishing or influencing members of the upper hierarchy diminished the hierarchy itself.
The spirit and atmosphere of Twitter-shaming is akin to a pitchfork mob: a group of heathens who, contrary to an idealistic administering of real justice, are unjust in their cold-hearted behaviour taken to extreme excess.
As recognised in previous centuries, to gratify oneself by watching the public punishment of another shows a lack of humanity, despite any appearance of concern for justice.
Public shaming is a social process that has been adapted to the online medium—and the social media “shaming process is fucking brutal.”
The Dark Psychology of Public Shamers
The ‘little people’ who had participated in a successful shaming campaign (via social media) enjoyed the collective feelings of victory, righteousness, and pride derived from defeating the ‘big people’ (such as organisations and public figures).
Analogous to drone strikes, Twitter-shamings are collective attacks administered remotely in a context of diffused responsibility. Hence, social media attackers easily spare themselves guilt and responsibility for helping to cause immense pain and destruction to other people’s lives.
Justine Sacco, who became infamous for what amounted to a badly-worded joke, may be the first person to have had their life destroyed by the public via Twitter. Given the amount of vitriolic responses, it’s evident that many people who participated in this public shaming chose to misinterpret her joke.
By self-righteous pretence to social justice, people thus exploit this new technology to indulge in age-old social sadism.
The reporting on Sacco’s Twitter shaming was devoid of honest and responsible journalism, in that there was little if any attempts to report the story as one of extreme and unjustified abuse by mob-like behaviour. This indicates that most journalists are cowardly in their responses to someone’s public shaming.
That Sacco was not a public figure or person of influence is significant because the online abusers could not have been motivated to “take down” someone they perceive to be “powerful” relative to them. Moreover, the abusiveness intensified after she had been effectively “taken down”—which also applied to the shaming of Jonah Lehrer, whose abuse continued despite his begging for forgiveness.
People (excluding psychopaths) who participate in and derive pleasure from online shamings must do so by ignoring the implications and evidence of its consequences, above all the destruction of someone’s life. This is why many people who are not sadists will easily participate in a form of group sadism (i.e. online shaming), the atmosphere of which insulates all from a basic sense of rightness, compassion, and guilt.
The mechanics of the shaming process includes a keenness of shamers to view the shamee as shameless, for this serves to generate the prerequisite process of dehumanisation.
Integral to the psychology of this process is the principle of cognitive dissonance and the corollary defense mechanisms of self-deception: by simply assenting to the distorted narrative, shamers are empowered by a fabricated feeling of righteousness in their contradictory and immoral behaviour.
Online shamers thus depend on the operative illusion provided by the collective atmosphere of fervent shaming.
To appear reasonable and just, most shamers clothe their invective in a sentiment of righteous concern, further enhanced by contrast with those whose expressions of condemnation are crude and extreme.
After enjoying the storm of collective condemnation, shamers want for the shamee to be permanently silenced, as if Social Justice has determined that the ‘cancelled’ person no longer has the right to speak. Once so convicted and obliterated, the person is to forever serve shamers as a cultural reference point to use as, when, and how they wish.
Finally, the shamed person is converted into a social object for cultural and political exploitation.
After a history of shamings, it’s telling that the average shamer will neither care nor be able to remember all the persons who were subject to these outrages.
Shamers make it seem that what they want is an apology—but that’s a lie. The goal of apology is communion, but shamers don’t facilitate communion because that’s not what they seek. As demonstrated by their actions, shamers want to destroy the character (and perhaps the life) of the transgressor, irrespective of his remorse.
The Sociology of Public and Online Shaming
An eternal (i.e. historical) principle of public shaming is that ostentatious punishments carried out in public are acts of soul destruction that brutalize everyone involved, including the onlookers. Thus, by the process of dehumanising the shamee, viewers and shamers dehumanise themselves (as indicated by the use of public shaming in Maoist China, Nazi Germany, and the Ku Klux Klan society in America).
Public shaming via social media began as a social weapon to “shame into acquiescence” organizations and their representatives judged by “communities” to be committing an injustice.—That’s how social media shaming began…
On Twitter, coercive condemnation began with public attacks on ivory-tower figures judged to have transgressed. By these early online shaming campaigns, ordinary people felt empowered to directly hold the powerful accountable to their actions.
Once established, however, this social media practice expanded – meaning descended – to the keen monitoring of people’s speech. Thenceforth, people’s mere words became an occasion for rageful campaigns of Twittered vilification.
Worse than journalistic satire or criticism, disproportionate or unwarranted punishment in the form of online vitriol became normalised on social media.
While the Western justice system is far from perfect and in many ways unjust, its rules at least ensure some basic rights for the accused. Conversely, accusations on the Internet are not governed by rules and laws. Moreover, the consequences of online accusations are worse than legal ones, especially in that the accusations are published worldwide and remain accessible forever.
As if energised by allegiance to a powerful neo-deity (Social Media), ordinary people giddily adopt the character of an ‘online soldier’ in a War On People’s Flaws that’s (privately) hoping for an escalation in hostilities.
Social media revealed itself to be a stage for fabricated social dramas in which people are made to be heroes and villains, ostensibly by the laws of mob rule.
The principles of group and mass psychology has been widely known since at least 1895, when Gustav Le Bon published his seminal work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Incisively, the book describes and explains the ‘madness of crowds’ and the receptiveness of the average mind to joining them.
Principles of group psychology, such as ‘deindividuation’, are certainly involved in online shaming. However, the remoteness and separateness inherent to digital forums like Twitter – as opposed a shared presence in public view – make for a diversity of responses that obscures a unity reflective of basic group psychology (i.e. ‘mob mentality’).
4chan is a place where disaffected youth channel their hostile feelings arising from social devaluation and powerlessness into revengeful online ‘activism’. In particular, the deskilled working class youth see the Internet as a way to gain power over others by exploiting the common lack of expertise in computer knowledge and skills. The possession of such expertise makes one a modern-day wizard, i.e. wielding the degree of powers over things and people that wizardry implies. Relative to Twitter, 4chan is devoid of normative morals and values: on 4chan, degradation is the name of the game.
Perhaps not surprisingly (considering mob mentality), people adjudged to be inappropriate shamers are, in turn, punished by shaming.
Social media appears to be the de facto courtroom of public shame: the ‘place’ where ‘decisions’ are made concerning the justified obliteration of a person’s social standing. It’s where consensus is supposedly formed by Public Opinion directly and purely, which is to say, without influence by the criminal justice system or the media.
Through social media, collective identification as an ‘empowered’ Public makes ordinary people feel like a formidable entity that directly dispenses justice. This sense of empowerment derives from the omnipresence and permanence of social media communication, which ensures that no one anywhere can find shelter from the social judiciary of online shaming.
The social practice of online shaming is based on a vigilance to catch people’s masks slipping – the momentary revelation of a ‘true’ self – and a swift informing of the online ‘community’ to the transgression(s) therein.
In the earlier days of social media, people laboured under the misapprehension that Twitter was a place where telling the truth about oneself to strangers was safe and amusing. In reality, this common impression disguised what proved to be an idealistic social experiment gone wrong.
Like the Stasi, modern culture makes people feel constantly surveilled and afraid to be themselves. And whereas the NSA surveils to protect society (at least in pretext), social and personal forms of surveillance (known as ‘sousveillance’) are motivated by schadenfreude, voyeurism, and sadistic pleasures disguised as social vigilance. In most cases, the apparent impulse to regulate the propriety of one’s neighbours’ behaviour thus conceals a desire to have and exercise power over others.
While egalitarianism is hailed as its greatest quality, by virtue of giving a voice to voiceless people, a Stasi-like spirit animates the informant-like activity of social media’s most intense users.
The Big Lie of the Internet is that its purpose is for the individual, the ‘user’. Society was made to believe that ‘choice’ and ‘personalisation’ of information (before it became ‘content’) equated to freedom and progress in knowledge, entertainment, commerce, and work. In reality, the Internet is and always has been about the agendas of the companies and institutions that control its data flows.
This structural control of the Internet and its apparatus is central to the genesis and evolution of dominant phenomena on social media platforms, not least the phenomenon of online shaming.
Feedback loops are systems that use outputted data to guide and reinforce input commands; self-regulating mechanisms designed to enhance performance. Feedback loop systems have been implemented in public utilities to alter common activities by inducing self-regulating behaviours (such as in digital road signs that display car speed in real time).
In the online world, the design of social media platforms and algorithms imperceptibly foster pernicious trends in online behaviour. In general, adversity is generated in social media systems and reinforced by feedback mechanisms.
When the opinion that ‘so-and-so is a monster’ is ‘trending’, this information and its presentation implicitly encourages users to co-sign that opinion and socially-validates them for continuing to promote it.
For many people, using social media is now conditioned by a horrible feeling of having to tiptoe around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced authority figure because of their tendency to lash out at any moment. Hence, few dare to post the jokes, little observations, and potentially risqué thoughts that were once fun to share online.
Despite society’s self-image as ‘non-conformist’, online culture attests to the contrary: that social media is a place where the boundaries of normality are defined by tearing apart the people outside of it.
The Destructive Effects of Humiliating Shame
Distinct from common forms of danger, the horror of humiliation can easily lead to malignant revenge fantasies; and internalised shame can lead to agony.
Courts in which the defendant is forced to attend public sentencing in front of news crews and cameras are reminiscent of the pillory in The Scarlet Letter. As described by Hawthorne, the pillory is an “instrument of discipline [by which] the very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest. There can be no outrage, methinks … more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.” Thus indicates the power of the shaming process to destroy the spirit of a person—merely through the public display of united contempt.
The essence of a scandalised shaming is the effective theft of a person’s life-narrative: a superimposed judgement that indefinitely determines who and what that person is.
The theft and replacement of one’s image and history is so devastating that even the anticipation of a scandal (about oneself) can make a person suicidal. For, as a rule, nobody ever comes back from a public scandal intact—if they come back at all.
Shame is at the root of much violence and murder: people who have grown up and lived in an atmosphere of contempt and disdain are tempted to gain respect by physical power. Much gun violence, for example, stems from the fact that pointing a gun at a person’s face is a sure way to gain instant respect. Violence and murder thus become a means to replace induced shame with produced self-esteem.
Rather than facilitating social and personal repair, the prison system reinforces the shame-violence cycle. Prison officers routinely treat prisoners with contempt and frequently express it in both physical and psychological abuse. Despite official rhetoric, the penal institution of the West is systemically cruel to its subjects (the guards themselves are typically uneducated and pathological), and in ways such to stimulate violent mentalities and behaviour in them.
Relatedly, interviews with murderers indicate that malignant shame is a universal cause for murder.
Shame is commonly thought of as a feeling. While shame is initially painful, constant shaming produces a deadening of feeling, a cold numbness. This is indicated by a common word used to describe overwhelming shame: mortification.
A therapeutic approach to penal institutes – as opposed to a negative environment devoid of constructive activities – could reform the system as well as its subjects. In an environment where prisoners are treated humanely and can express their thoughts and feelings beneficially, excessive shame and its destructive effects could be minimised. Similarly, an educational programme in prison could also have a de-shaming effect on inmates. However, such reform is universally avoided or mishandled by governments and institutions.
Despite that people are a complicated mixture of flaws, talents, and sins, online shamers conveniently forget or deny the complexity of people in their penchant for shaming. Consequently, victims of online shamings are given a strong sense (by society) that there will be no forgiveness for them, that there is no way to reclaim basic membership in the social world. This condition is reflected by the frequency of the word ‘forever’ in the world of the publicly shamed.
The Legal, Professional, and Social Permissibility of Public Shaming
Online shaming is not against the law, therefore online shamers are not criminals. However, the emotional damage (trauma) caused by online shaming far exceeds that of most acts criminals are incarcerated for. The injuries that social media users perpetrate on each other all the time are within the realm of legal crimes, and yet are effectively protected by the law. Thus, while online shamers may technically be ‘non-criminal’, the intent and effects of their actions equate to the spirit of criminality.
In the world of the courtroom, where it’s accepted that witnesses need to be grilled and their honesty must be tested, shaming has always been venerated as a first-line tactic. To lawyers, shaming is as natural as breathing.
In the august institution of Law, the disproportionate significance of shaming has been entrenched over generations. This partly explains why many people see shaming in the way that free-market libertarians see capitalism: a beautiful beast that must be allowed to run free. This tacitly held value can be seen manifested all over social media, where the shaming crusade has only just begun.
Shaming is so central to the judicial process that courtroom familiarisation courses amount to shaming familiarisation and shame-avoidance techniques. By methods of psychology, rhetoric, prosody, facial expression, and body language, lawyers aim to tarnish the image of the witness/defendant by emotional manipulation, implication, and entrapment. And yet, people tend to judge a person on their lack of composure during a public shaming, which of course is an irrational and unjust way of forming an opinion about someone.
As demonstrated by the tactics of courtroom lawyers, the immediate effect of shaming is akin to a distorting mirror at a funfair: it takes the image of human nature and makes it appear monstrous. Despite pretensions to a fairer form of justice, social media shaming no less distorts people’s character into monsters, merely for different motives and by novel means.
The Right to be Forgotten is a law that might help some actual transgressors who have been barely shamed; for example, a former fraudster whose deeds were never made into a hot topic within social media. By contrast, the Right to be Forgotten offers neither protection nor improvement to the life of the super-shamed (such as Justine Sacco).
The main reason for this unjust disparity (in the Right to be Forgotten) is the auto-archival nature of the Internet, and more crucially, the influence of Google’s search results. People’s total lack of control of internet search results means that the super-shamed are left feeling helpless in escaping their infamy (as Sacco found). The inescapable result is that all a person can do is to wait and hope that the search results will change in time—which will certainly be a long time…
Related Media
Enforcing Social Norms: The Morality of Public Shaming (2020 Academic Article)
While the subject of morality features more implicitly than explicitly in Ronson’s book, this excellent academic article examines it directly (referencing Ronson in the process). The authors (Paul Billingham & Tom Parr) effectively classify the various elements, sub-themes, situations and factors relevant to assessing the morality of public shaming practices, in the context of the social legitimacy of norm-enforcement.
Hated in the Nation (2016, Black Mirror S3E6)
Released the year following Shamed, this episode of the tech-dystopian Black Mirror series was partly inspired by Ronson’s book—and it shows. The quality of Hated in the Nation as a Black Mirror episode seems to have divided opinion among viewers, with some hailing it as dreadfully brilliant and others criticising its style or believability. To me, Hated is a top tier episode because it very effectively symbolises the personal, social, and national consequences of the confluence of public shaming (an eternal social process) and modern mobile technologies. In this respect, Hated is the perfect fictional companion to the literal insights and pertinence of Shamed.
Then again, the terrors of Hated may not be so symbolic and fictional after all…
Slaughterbots (2017 Short Film)
As if to form a chain, the sci-fi short film Slaughterbots was released the year following Hated in the Nation. Distinctly from the Black Mirror episode, this short film was expressly created to advocate for the regulation of modern weaponry, specifically the type of autonomous microdrones depicted as the ADIs (Autonomous Drone Insects) in Hated. Slaughterbots thus represents a semi-official warning that what Charlie Brooker considered to be a potential menace to society – a national disaster, in fact – is in reality a legitimate social issue in the making.
Cyberbully (2015 Film)
This Black Mirror-esque television movie explores the nature and effects of cyberbullying to chilling effect.
Forced Attendance for Sentencing in the UK (News Report)
Criminals WILL be forced into court for sentencing under new powers given to judges after outrage at Lucy Letby and other killers who refused to face their victims’ families, (Daily) Mail Online, 30 August 2023
This recent ruling reported in the news relates directly to the point in Shamed made by a passage from The Scarlet Letter. In the novel, the pillory – a device that forces a culprit to have his face displayed to all present – is described as embodying and making manifest the ideal of ignominy, therefore producing the utmost effect of humiliation on the so publicly shamed.
The following are my extracts from the report outlining the key details of the ruling:
… authorities will also be able to use ‘reasonable force’ to make those convicted appear in court – demonstrating to victims and relatives that justice has been done. Rishi Sunak … said that offenders will no longer be allowed to take the ‘coward’s way out’.
‘That’s why we’re going to change the law so that courts could compel these offenders to be present for their sentencing and to hear the impact that their actions have had, but also, if necessary, to use reasonable force to bring those people to court, and also to add time on to their sentence if they don’t appear. I think that’s the right thing to do. People rightly expect criminals to face up to the consequences of their actions.’
The promised reforms – which the Mail has pushed for – will give custody officers the power to use ‘reasonable force’ to ensure those awaiting sentencing appear in the dock or via video link. Those convicted could also face an extra two years in jail if they ignore a judge’s order and continue to refuse to attend court …
‘If the defendant doesn’t come and face justice, it’s beyond cowardly and can have a devastating impact on victims and their families. This can be a vital part of seeing justice done.’
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson (Book Extracts)
Having read this book in digital copy and extracted my highlights to Word, I re-read the extracts (several months later) whilst highlighting portions with this article in mind. These original extracts can be read and downloaded as a PDF mini-book by clicking the image below.
Stepping Stones 