Jon Ronson: The Shame Game

 

I don’t know what it’s like to have spent months and months interviewing people who have been torn to pieces by the internet and the media for contentious actions and statements. But if I were to guess, then I’d say it probably makes you measure your words carefully.

 

For this reason I’m a little apprehensive about interviewing the author Jon Ronson, who has just spent the past two years investigating modern cases of public shaming in the digital age – people who have lost their dignity, their jobs and almost lost their minds as a result of errors of judgement that the internet has magnified through shares, retweets and clickbait articles. I can’t help feeling that even by wading in on the topic Jon is potentially putting himself in the firing line. So what’s going on?

 

‘There's been this renaissance of public shaming in the last few years,’ says Jon. ‘It has turned the world into a colder and more conservative and more fearful place, where people are being ruined for lesser and lesser crimes.’

 

Jon’s book is called So You Have Been Publicly Shamed. A few years ago this wouldn’t have been a title a lot of people could relate to, outside a few celebrities and politicians. Now it feels like anybody with a handful of followers on social media could be at the heart of a media storm. And if you haven’t been publicly shamed, you may have done the shaming – through Twitter hashtags, anonymous internet comments or even published editorial. ‘We're the ones being destroyed and we're the ones doing the destroying,’ says Jon. ‘I thought it was important to write a book that really humanised all of this; where I meet the people who have been the stories.’ 

 

His subjects include Justine Sacco, a former Corporate Communications Director who sent an ill-advised puff of ‘ironic’ racism spinning off into the Twittersphere, expecting to hit her core demographic of 170 followers and unfortunately catching the attention of a writer at Gawker. There’s an excruciating appearance by Jonah Lehrer, the American pop science writer, who was caught creatively remixing a Bob Dylan quote as well as plagiarising himself and other writers, crimes for which he lost his job at The New Yorker and was torn to pieces by the internet. But these high profile cases are just the starting point for Jon’s wide-reaching exploration of shame – what it feels like, what it does to us psychologically, how it functions in the media and in prisons and inside our heads. 

 

‘I’m not saying we shouldn't be cynical or sarcastic or investigative or satirical. All of those are wonderful things. But the real change is that we're now being disproportionately punishing,’ Jon explains. ‘Is this the world we really want to create for ourselves?’

 

 

Of course, you might say that a world without a swift critical response is a world where attitudes change more slowly and injustice may go unpunished. And for some of Jon’s subjects it seems quite difficult to condemn the internet’s treatment of them without implicitly defending their behaviour. While I was reading the book, I say, I was concerned that someone might now target you for being an apologist.

 

‘Actually, I did notice something just this morning on Twitter,’ Jon says. ‘Because I wrote about Justine Sacco, and was unquestionably sympathetic about her, someone said something along the lines of, “Is Jon Ronson going to put his cape on and defend those racist Chelsea fans who pushed a man off a train?” Well, no, because they're completely different situations!’

 

‘Justine wasn't Cartman, she was Trey Parker,’ he adds. ‘She was making a joke about stupid privilege.’

 

But trying to distinguish between intended and unintended racism is, first of all, potentially contentious in itself, and secondly, takes longer than the time it takes to execute a disgusted retweet. Twitter, one feels, was not built to withstand the burden of nuance. ‘If someone sends out a racist tweet then that's a big deal,’ says Jon. ‘People like Stan Collymore when they get racist tweets they retweet them so everyone can see, and that feels like... that feels... potentially... like a good thing...’ It feels like justice?

 

‘Well, that's a complicated word. But for the want of a better phrase I am a politically correct person, I believe words have power. But I just don't think Justine fits into that.’

 

Things aren’t always so clear-cut, such as in the case of the journalist Jonah Lehrer. It strikes me that one of his crimes – self plagiarism – isn’t considered a great crime in a British media context (‘I came back to Britain and gave a talk in London about him and the overwhelming response I got was exactly that,’ Jon confirms. ‘There's definitely a cultural difference.’) On the other hand, almost anyone would agree that Jonah’s other misdemeanours – making up a quote and stealing someone else’s work – were indefensible. Jonah’s troubling case left Jon with some anxieties about whether he would have to pick a side. ‘Because I felt that people had been so brutal towards Jonah, did that mean I had to defend what he had done? In the end I came to the conclusion that it was not my job. It was a huge relief.’ 

 

Jon admits he has not always been a bystander in this instant-justice culture. The book opens with him recounting various incidents where he has been a willing member of the mob, such as when social media mobilised against the writer Jan Moir after she wrote an offensive article about the death of pop singer Stephen Gately. He believes that Twitter can also be a force for good. 

 

‘Recently the Daily Mail did this terrible story about a charity food bank giving food to an undercover reporter without running a background check on him, and Twitter mobilised and gave all this money to the food bank. I can think of lots of examples like that when a great good-heartedness happens. There's a magic side to Twitter, but there's this really dark side too.’

 

So how can we find a balance? ‘Raising money for a food bank charity that has been wrongly attacked is great and it’s social justice at its best,’ says Jon. ‘Organising something like the #blacklivesmatter campaign, that's great. But tearing a woman to pieces for a badly-worded joke isn't wise. To me it’s really simple.’

 

I wonder if Jon has any advice for people who want to avoid a public shaming. ‘I noticed after the New York Times ran an extract from the book that quite a lot of the responses were like, “Justine Sacco's case proves that you should think before you press send.” That's an understandable response to my book. But in my heart that's not the message I want to send. I don't want my book to create a more fearful world. What I really want is for the opposite – for people to think before they decide to pile in on someone for a stupid thing they’ve done.’

 

Jon’s book is a catalogue of consequences – it reports from the eye of a Twitter storm but continues following the story into the long aftermath. Some of the book’s most distressing passages are not about the hysterical maelstrom of a media explosion, but the months and years of regret that follow, when people are facing up to a future where their bad reputation is branded onto the internet forever. Will we eventually all have our 15 minutes of shame and move on? Accept that the first page of someone’s google results isn’t a fair representation of who they are? ‘Well that would be nice,’ says Jon. ‘I hope my book contributes to that. Because I really don't think we want a world where we are defined by the stupidest thing we ever did.’

 

An Evening Of Public Shaming With Jon Ronson, Broadway Cinema, Friday 13 March, 7.30pm, £10. 
So You Have Been Publicly Shamed is published on Thursday 12 March by Picador

 

Jon Ronson's website