We Are Living in a Post-Shame World—And That’s Not a Good Thing
12/13/16
In 2015, Jon Ronson wrote an important and sobering book about the epidemic of public shaming brought on by social media.
It was a criticism of our cultural tendency to collectively gang up on and punish supposedly aberrant behavior like an offensive remark, a marital affair, an embarrassing photo, unacceptable beliefs or a lapse in judgment. It was undoubtedly a crisis for the last several years of social media—we were too strict, too united and too quick to enforce the social norms with disproportionately severe, life-altering punishments.
Does it not strike you, however, two years or so after publication, how quaint this criticism seems?
Because it occurs to me here on the cusp of 2017 that the idea of enough people in society agreeing on something being far enough ‘over the line’ to warrant real, shared outrage is more or less an impossibility. If a celebrity other than Alec Baldwin was caught calling a paparazzi photographer a ‘cocksucker,’ this afternoon, what are the chances that anyone would get that upset? Would we nearly drive them out of show business for being politically incorrect? If a young female PR executive was flying to South Africa next week and tweeted an offensive, poorly written joke about AIDS, I do not suspect that there would be life-changing consequences for her.
As absurd as those reactions were and as much as those impulses needed to be curbed, I’m not sure our new normal is any better. Because today we seem to be beyond shame—and beyond expressing joint opinions in even the clearest and most non-partisan of situations.
I’m no proponent of public shaming—I think the response to the Justine Sacco incident in 2013 was embarrassing and cruel. I’m just curious about what would transpire if the event happened today. Certainly, some people would find it in poor taste and be upset. But I also wonder whether a significant group of people, in response to those who tried to shame her, would take her remark literally and decide they actually support Sacco and. If she was so inclined, could she skip hiding out, fan the controversy and join the alt-right ranks? I half-suspect social media trolls might be floating theories about whether the photographer Alec Baldwin slandered really was a cocksucker or not. Instead of faux-outrage, we’d be looking at faux-intellectualizing—rationalizing, embracing the very thing that would have disgusted almost every reasonable person not long ago.