The British journalist and broadcaster talks approximately shame,bullying and his disenchantment with social mediaJon Ronson’s latest book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, or looks at how some people’s lives have been ruined by the reaction to an ill-judged social-media confession or a clumsy tweet. A new chapter for the paperback edition reports on how he too became a victim of aggressive censure for suggesting that the “shaming” of people like Rachel Dolezal (the white civil-rights campaigner who identified herself as black) was a form of vicious mob rule.
The phrase that kept cropping up in my intellect as I read your book was the way a News of the World journalist described his job: “This is what we do: we recede out and kill other people’s lives.” It used to be the most out-of-control tabloid journalists doing that – is it now anonymous social‑media trolls?
I’ve noticed all year this weird psychological thing going on that people who love finding faults in others for abuses of power react with a fury when it is pointed out that they are abusing the power of social media themselves. Time and again on Twitter we act like the thing we purport to abominate.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com