What a shame: Jon Ronson’s tour of the shamed and shamers

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Published in 2015, this book is already quite old in internet terms. Many of the controversies examined in it are long forgotten, except, no doubt, by the unfortunate people at the centre of them.

But its theme, the power of social media to polarise opinion and turn an unintended remark into the focus of an angry public debate, remains as relevant as ever.

Indeed, that effect now seems a microcosm of bigger social divisions that make our collective ability to handle difficult decisions increasingly tricky, or (the US government happens to be closing down today) impossible. Whether social media is the cause or a symptom of that larger phenomenon, who knows?

I’d never read a book by Ronson before but I recognised his style as a British version of Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell and any number of American writer/reporters who tell stories by taking their readers on a ‘journey’ as they recount in a breezy, intelligent style what they found and how they found it.

The paperback edition is plastered with ecstatic reviews, which may have put me off because they promise the book is “incredibly funny”, “amusing” or “very funny”.

I didn’t find it funny but I was impressed with Ronson’s ability to gain access to his subjects, all of whom had had experiences that might make them press delete on any email that begins “I’m a writer and I’m hoping to ask you about your recent humiliating experience of finding yourself in the public eye and the terrible consequences that followed.”

Ronson calls what happened to these people ‘being publicly shamed’, but I’m not convinced that ‘shaming’ is a broad enough term for the range of cases he studies. There’s the PR woman from New York who tweeted what she had intended to be an ironic comment about Africa and AIDS. As she flew to South Africa a global storm gathered to pillory her for being racist. Does ‘being publicly shamed’ cover her case, when her line on it, which Ronson accepts, is that her little joke was misinterpreted?

Since Ronson is in the same game as some of his subjects, the book is constantly in danger of crossing the line into self-examination. One of Ronson’s subjects, Jonah Lehrer, a fellow writer of popular non-fiction books, was found by another journalist to have made up some quotes from Bob Dylan. Ronson tells us about his meeting with both of them. He is asked by Lehrer to take a look at Lehrer’s proposed public apology for his Dylan transgressions, putting him uncomfortably close to being part of the story himself – especially because that apology went horribly wrong.

Then there’s the account of how an early, pre-publication draft of the book somehow got muddled up with the published version on social media. The draft included a passage which someone interpreted as equating rape with a man’s experience of being fired. Ronson had cut the line from the book before it was published because of the danger of that very misinterpretation. And the draft had been sent out under the heading ‘Not for quotation’. But when Ronson tried to explain all that on Twitter, it didn’t cut much ice: “you should never have thought it,” he was told. It’s a tough old world.

Some of Ronson’s work on the history and background to the phenomenon are among the most interesting parts of the book. I particularly enjoyed his debunking of the famous Zimbardo prison experiment which purported to demonstrate that anyone can be turned into a sadistic prison guard just by being put in a team that’s asked to play the guards rather than the volunteers who are asked to play the part of prisoners.

Ronson finds that the sensational deductions drawn from the experiment hinged largely on the performance of one particular volunteer, Dave Eshelman. Ronson tracks him down (he now “runs a home loan company in Saratoga, California”) and Eshelman tells him that at the time of the experiment he’d just seen the movie Cool Hand Luke about a sadistic prison warden. When nothing much happened during the first night of the experiment, Eshelman realised the psychologists were going to be disappointed: “I thought ‘someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results’. So I thought I’d get some action going.” So maybe it’s not true that human beings are as susceptible to the roles they’re given as conventional wisdom suggests.

This is a compelling, highly readable account of a wonderfully human phenomenon. Its attraction to readers may overlap a little with the voyeuristic thrills that draw social media users to the people in trouble that Ronson is writing about. But Ronson has an answer to that: he’s writing about “us” – the condemning, judgemental public who enjoy nothing more than joining in cruel, self-righteous shamings. It’s not other people you should be deploring: it’s us.

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