Unless you read The Guardian online or watch the BBC, you may

Unless you read

The Guardian online or watch the BBC, you may not be familiar with the masterfully sly and self-deprecating English journalist Jon Ronson. Now also living in New York, he’s gradually infiltrated This American Life; and his books The Men Who Stare at Goats and Frank have been made into acclaimed movies. Back in Britain, he’s the rare newsman who’s successfully bridged into new media, including Twitter, which makes So Now You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead, $27.90) both timely and disturbing. Ronson, we learn in his very breezy first-person style, was an early adopter of the Internet, an early fan of Google. As every professional writer knows, the Web is your first line of research—your library, your librarian, your personal assistant and fact-checker.

Except when it’s wrong. And for a certain woeful class of cybershame mob victims, the Web can go very, very wrong. One example comes from the young woman I quote in the headline above, who in 2012 posted a jokey photo of herself at Arlington National Cemetery. She—and I am not going to name Ronson’s subjects, for reasons to become clear—was soon vilified for a silly, ill-considered snapshot she intended only for close friends who knew her sense of humor. It went viral because she didn’t check, or didn’t understand, Facebook’s privacy settings.

Soon she was mobbed by hate-spewing Internet commenters and trolls, most of the conservative Tea Party variety, for supposedly disrespecting dead war veterans. Ronson samples the vitriol: “U retarded cunt,” “Send the dumb feminist to prison,” “Fuck you whore,” and so on. This young woman, who worked with learning-disabled adults, soon lost her job and retreated to her apartment, massively shamed and traumatized. “Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,” she tells Ronson in his exclusive interview.

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Among his other interviewees—how does Ronson get these gets?—are a publicist who made an AIDS joke on Twitter (actually mocking white privilege), an author who fabricated Bob Dylan quotes, a programmer whose whispered schoolboy innuendo to a pal at a tech conference was overheard, and public figures whose private sex lives were suddenly broadcast over the Internet, losing them their jobs. Everyone here loses their job, their reputation, their public face, their personhood. At work we see an awful, destructive take-down process in which, during the early days of the Internet, Ronson admits he willingly participated. (He once called out a rival English writer for enthusiastically discoursing upon the pleasures of baboon hunting—rather worse, of course, than a dirty joke or private sex party.)

Where is the proportion? There is none, because of the magnifying power of the Internet. One tasteless post or intemperate tweet, and suddenly you’re Hitler. Most all of Ronson’s shame-victims are recent; this is a book compiled quickly and journalistically from still-smoldering accounts you may’ve encountered elsewhere (on Gawker, Wired, and of course The Guardian). Ronson does plenty of original reporting, but there’s also the sense of a speedy, anecdote-driven survey of the bilious Webscape. The mere act of hitting the send button—instantly drawing hits, likes, or scorn—is still very new. It’s easy to mock inane Hollywood celebrity tweets or the sexting follies of teenagers, but even the best of us can make similar cyber-mistakes.

The reason for this transgression-and-shaming cycle, so far amplified beyond the old pillory, is fundamentally technological. Back in the Middle Ages or puritan New England, we adulterers or witches only had to worry about small community opinion. Hester Prynne knew only a few dozen people in her lifetime, most of them illiterate. And she had no Facebook account. Today, writes Ronson, “Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval.” And so too does it facilitate our infamy once the shame cascade begins. Though Ronson never gets any executives from Google or Facebook on record, search engines profitably reinforce the negative: Once you’ve been publicly shamed, as Cemetery Woman notes above, no one looks past the first page of the search results to find the real you.

Ronson ambles through his reported vignettes without any great thesis in mind. And not all his anecdotes have a solid payoff. (I could’ve done without visits to a California sex-debasement club and a New Jersey prison; his experience cross-dressing for a newspaper assignment teaches us nothing.) This is a short, topical book, not scholarly research. Still, I wish Ronson had dug a little deeper into the ancient social/psychological urge to cast out pariahs and find scapegoats for wider social ills. He’s right that the Internet helps us enforce a herd mentality (“All of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age”), but hasn’t it ever been such? The Bible was the Internet of the Middle Ages, spreading and imposing its codes, the church inflicting its punishments (the pillory included). Heretics and their ilk have always been symbolic outcasts: Their existence in the community threatens the political order (or betokens a new one).

Also, had I been the editor of this highly entertaining and deeply troubling book, I would’ve asked Ronson to write a chapter on the notion of anonymity, because most Internet shamers (like the commenters and trolls on Gawker, Reddit, 4chan, etc.) are nameless cowards. Only the victim’s name is known, and every time we treat ourselves to that self-validating little endorphin rush of righteous shaming (I make myself good by condemning the bad), that name surges to the top of the first page of Google search results. (This is why I don’t name Cemetery Woman; I don’t want to be part of that cycle.) Scientists tell Ronson this is a feedback loop, resulting both from neurochemistry—more on this please, Jon—and a closed information system. It’s like the red/blue divide in politics. Some of us get our ideological reinforcement on FOX News, others via The New York Times; but both camps gleefully participate in shaming the other. Because it makes us feel good.

The worst thing for one victim, Ronson writes, “was her lack of control over the Google search results. They were just there, eternal, crushing.” That would be a terrible last thought, and make for a fatally depressing book, if Ronson didn’t then find computer scientists who could push one’s rightful self back onto the first page.

bmiller@seattleweekly.com

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