So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (PDF)

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Now a New York Times bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world’s most underappreciated forces: shame. ‘It’s about the terror, isn’t it?’ ‘The terror of what?’ I said. ‘The terror of being found out.’ For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us – people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they’re being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job. A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people’s faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control. Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws – and the very scary part we all play in it.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Gutsy and smart. Without losing any of the clever agility that makes his books so winning, he has taken on truly consequential material and risen to the challenge….fascinating…shocking…Mr. Ronson’s gift for detail-picking is, as ever, a treat.” –The New York Times“A sharp-eyed and often hilarious book…Jon Ronson has written a fresh, big-hearted take on an important and timely topic. He has nothing to be ashamed of.” –NPR.org “A diligent investigator and a wry, funny writer, Ronson manages to be at once academic and entertaining.” –The Boston Globe“This is a wonderful book.” –Jon Stewart “This book really needed to be written.” –Salon.com“Required reading for the internet age.” – Entertainment Weekly“With an introspective and often funny lens, [Ronson] tracks down those whose blunders have exploded in the public eye…So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is an insightful, well-researched, and important text about how we react to others’ poor decisions.” –The Huffington Post “Personable and empathetic, Ronson is an entertaining guide to the odd corners of the shame-o-sphere.” –The Minneapolis Star Tribune“It’s sharply observed, amusingly told, and, while its conclusions may stop just short of profound, the true pleasure of the book lies in arriving at those conclusions.” –The Onion“Like all of Ronson’s books, this one is hard to put down, but you will absolutely do so at some point to Google yourself.” –TheMillions.com“An irresistibly gossipy cocktail with a chaser of guilt.” –Newsday “With So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed Ronson has written a timely, interesting and titillating read for any Internet drama junkie.” –PopMatters.com“[A] simultaneously lightweight and necessary book.” –Esquire”A work of original, inspired journalism, it considers thecomplex dynamics between those who shame and those who are shamed, both of whom can become the focus ofsocial media’s grotesque, disproportionate judgments.” –The Financial Times”[So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] is both entertaining and fair — a balance we could use a lot more of, online and off.” –Vulture “Ronson is an entertaining and provocative writer, with a broad reach …[So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] is a well-reported, entertainingly written account of an important subject.” –The Oregonian”Ronson is a fun writer to read…fascinating.” –Fast Company“I was mesmerized. And I was also disturbed.” –Forbes”[So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] promises to be the most relevant book of the year.” –FlavorWire “I was sickly fascinated by the book. I think it’s Ronson’s best book.” –Mark Frauenfelder for BoingBoing”With confidence, verve, and empathy, Ronson skillfully informs and engages the reader without excusing those caught up in the shame game. As he stresses, we are the ones wielding this incredible power over others’ lives, often with no regard for the lasting consequences of our actions.” –Starred Booklist Review”Clever and thought-provoking, this book has the potential to open an important dialogue about faux moral posturing online and its potentially disastrous consequences.” –Publishers Weekly“Relentlessly entertaining and thought-provoking.” –The Guardian “Certainly, no reader could finish it without feeling a need to be gentler online, to defer judgment, not to press the retweet button, to resist that primal impulse to stoke the fires of shame.”–The Times “Excruciating, un-put-downable…So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a gripping read, packed with humor and compassion and Ronson’s characteristic linguistic juggling of the poignant and the absurd.” –Chapter16.org “A powerful and rewarding read, a book utterly of the moment.”—The Hamilton Spectator“Ronson is a lovely, fluid writer, and he has a keen eye for painful, telling details.” —The Bloomberg View“Fascinating and trenchant.” –The Denver Post “[Ronson] is one of our most important modern day thinkers…[So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] is one of the most therapeutic books imaginable.” – US News & Word Report“Personable and empathetic, Ronson is an entertaining guide to the odd corners of the shame-o-sphere.” –The Houston Chronicle “[A] satirical Malcolm Gladwell… an accessible, fun read.” – Everyday Ebook”We love Jon Ronson. He’s thoughtful and very funny. [So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] is a great book about the way the internet can gang up on people and shame them, when they deserve it, when they don’t deserve it and it’s great.” – Judd Apatow”Jon Ronson is unreal. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed –everyone should read that book. He’s one of my favorite human beings.” – Bill Hader “[A] brilliant, thought-provoking book – a fascinating examination of citizen justice, which has enjoyed a great renaissance since the advent of the internet.” – Tatler “A terrifying and keen insight into a new form of misguided mass hysteria.” – Jesse Eisenberg “A fascinating exploration of modern media and public shaming… It’s a great conversation starter. Is Twitter the new Salem Witch trials?”– Reese Witherspoon About the Author Jon Ronson’s books include the New York Times bestsellers The Psychopath Testand Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, and international bestsellers Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats. He also cowrote the screenplay for Frank, which will be released in theaters August 2014, and which stars Michael Fassbender and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Ronson is a regular contributor toThis American Life and lives in London and New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. OneThis story begins in early January 2012, when I noticed that another Jon Ronson had started posting on Twitter. His photograph was a photograph of my face. His Twitter name was @Jon_Ronson. His most recent tweet, which appeared as I stared in surprise at his timeline, read: “Going home. Gotta get the recipe for a huge plate of guarana and mussel in a bap with mayonnaise 😀 #yummy.”“Who are you?” I tweeted him.“Watching #Seinfeld. I would love a big plate of celeriac, grouper and sour cream kebab with lemongrass. #foodie,” he tweeted.I didn’t know what to do.—The next morning I checked @Jon_Ronson’s timeline before I checked my own. In the night he had tweeted, “I’m dreaming something about #time and #cock.”He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I’d suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock.—I did some digging. I discovered that a young researcher, formerly of Warwick University, called Luke Robert Mason had a few weeks earlier posted a comment on the Guardian site. It was in response to a short video I had made about spambots. “We’ve built Jon his very own infomorph,” he wrote. “You can follow him on Twitter here: @Jon_Ronson.”Oh, so it’s some kind of spambot, I thought. Okay. This will be fine. Luke Robert Mason must have thought I would like the spambot. When he finds out that I don’t, he’ll remove it.So I tweeted him: “Hi!! Will you take down your spambot please?”Ten minutes passed. Then he replied, “We prefer the term infomorph.”I frowned. “But it’s taken my identity,” I wrote.“The infomorph isn’t taking your identity,” he wrote back. “It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic esthetic.”I felt a tightness in my chest.“#woohoo damn, I’m in the mood for a tidy plate of onion grill with crusty bread. #foodie,” @Jon_Ronson tweeted.I was at war with a robot version of myself.—A month passed. @Jon_Ronson was tweeting twenty times a day about its whirlwind of social engagements, its “soirees,” and its wide circle of friends. It now had fifty followers. They were getting a disastrously misrepresentative depiction of my views on soirees and friends. The spambot left me feeling powerless and sullied. My identity had been redefined all wrong by strangers and I had no recourse.—I tweeted Luke Robert Mason. If he was adamant that he wouldn’t take down his spambot, perhaps we could at least meet? I could film the encounter and put it on YouTube. He agreed, writing that he’d be glad to explain the philosophy behind the infomorph. I replied that I’d certainly be interested to learn the philosophy behind the spambot.—I rented a room in central London. I sat there, nervously waiting. On the dot of our prearranged meeting, Luke arrived with two other men—the team behind the spambot. All three were academics. They had met at Warwick University. Luke was the youngest of the three, handsome, in his twenties, a “researcher in technology and cyberculture and director of the Virtual Futures Conference,” according to his online CV. David Bausola looked like a rakish teacher, the sort of person who might speak at a conference on the literature of Aleister Crowley. He was a “creative technologist” and the CEO of the digital agency Philter Phactory. Dan O’Hara had a shaved head, and eyes that were piercing and annoyed-looking. His jaw was clenched. He was in his late thirties, a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Cologne. Before that, he’d been a lecturer at Oxford. He’d coedited a book about J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, and another book, Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control. As far as I understood it, David Bausola had done the actual building of the spambot, while the two other men provided “research and consultancy.”I suggested that they sit in a row on the sofa so I could film them all in a single shot. Dan O’Hara gave the others a glance.“Let’s play along,” he said to them. They all sat, with Dan in the middle.“What do you mean by ‘play along’?” I asked him.“It’s about psychological control,” he said.“Do you think my having you in a row on the sofa is my way of psychologically controlling you?” I asked.“Absolutely,” said Dan.“In what way?” I asked.“I do that with students,” said Dan. “I put myself in a separate chair and put the students in a row on the sofa.”“Why would you want to psychologically control some students?” I asked.Dan looked briefly worried that he’d been caught saying something eerie. “In order to control the learning environment,” he said.“Is this making you feel uncomfortable?” I asked him.“No, not really,” said Dan. “Are you uncomfortable?”“Yes,” I said.“Why?” Dan asked.I spelled out my grievances. “Academics,” I began, “don’t swoop into a person’s life uninvited and use him for some kind of academic exercise, and when I ask you to take it down, you’re, ‘Oh, it’s not a spambot, it’s an infomorph.’”Dan nodded. He leaned forward. “There must be lots of Jon Ronsons out there?” he began. “People with your name? Yes?”I looked suspiciously at him. “I’m sure there are people with my name,” I replied, carefully.“I’ve got the same problem,” said Dan, with a smile. He gave me an empathetic look. “There’s another academic out there with my name.”“You don’t have exactly the same problem as I do,” I said, “because my exact problem is that three strangers have stolen my identity and have created a robot version of me and are refusing to take it down even though they come from respectable universities and give TEDx talks.”Dan let out a long-suffering sigh. “You’re saying, ‘There is only one Jon Ronson,’” he said. “You’re proposing yourself as the real McCoy, as it were, and you want to maintain that integrity and authenticity. Yes?”I stared at him.“I think we feel annoyed with you,” Dan continued, “because we’re not quite persuaded by that. We think there’s already a layer of artifice and it’s your online personality—the brand Jon Ronson—you’re trying to protect. Yeah?”“NO, IT’S JUST ME TWEETING,” I yelled.“The Internet is not the real world,” said Dan.“I write my tweets,” I replied. “And I press send. So it’s me on Twitter.”We glared at each other.“That’s not academic,” I said. “That’s not postmodern. That’s the fact of it.”“This is bizarre,” Dan said. “I find it really strange—the way you’re approaching this. You must be one of the very few people who have chosen to come on Twitter and use their own name as their Twitter name. Who does that? And that’s why I’m a little suspicious of your motives, Jon. That’s why I say I think you’re using it as brand management.”I said nothing, but to this day it kills me that it didn’t cross my mind to point out to him that Luke Robert Mason’s Twitter name is @LukeRobertMason.Our conversation continued like this for an hour. I told Dan that I have never used the term brand management in my life. “Language like that is alien to me,” I said. “And that’s the same with your spambot. Its language is different to mine.”“Yes,” the three men agreed in unison.“And that’s what’s annoying me so much,” I explained. “It’s a misrepresentation of me.”“You’d like it to be more like you?” Dan said.“I’d like it to not exist,” I said.“That’s bizarre,” said Dan. He let out an incredulous whistle. “I find something psychologically interesting about that.”“Why?” I said.“I find that quite aggressive,” he said. “You’d like to kill these algorithms? You must feel threatened in some way.” He gave me a concerned look. “We don’t go around generally trying to kill things we find annoying.”“You’re a TROLL!” I yelled.—After the interview was over, I staggered out into the London afternoon. I dreaded uploading the footage onto YouTube because I’d been so screechy. I steeled myself for comments mocking my screechiness and I posted it. I left it up for ten minutes. Then, with apprehension, I had a look.“This is identity theft,” read the first comment I saw. “They should respect Jon’s personal liberty.”Wow, I thought, cautiously.“Somebody should make alternate Twitter accounts of all of those ass clowns and constantly post about their strong desire for child porn,” read the next comment.I grinned.“These people are manipulative assholes,” read the third. “Fuck them. Sue them, break them, destroy them. If I could see these people face to face I would say they are fucking pricks.”I was giddy with joy. I was Braveheart, striding through a field, at first alone, and then it becomes clear that hundreds are marching behind me.“Vile, disturbing idiots playing with someone else’s life and then laughing at the victim’s hurt and anger,” read the next comment.I nodded soberly.“Utter hateful arseholes,” read the next. “These fucked up academics deserve to die painfully. The cunt in the middle is a fucking psychopath.”I frowned slightly. I hope nobody’s going to actually hurt them, I thought.“Gas the cunts. Especially middle cunt. And especially left-side bald cunt. And especially quiet cunt. Then piss on their corpses,” read the next comment.—I won. Within days, the academics took down @Jon_Ronson. They had been shamed into acquiescence. Their public shaming had been like the button that restores factory settings. Something was out of kilter. The community rallied. The balance was redressed. The academics made a very big meal of eradicating their spambot. They wrote a Guardian column explaining that their wider aim was to highlight the tyranny of Wall Street algorithms: “It’s not just Ronson who has bots manipulating his life. It’s all of us.” I still didn’t understand why pretending I eat wasabi dumplings might draw the public’s attention to the scourge of Wall Street algorithms.—“I have been asked to retire you—do you understand what that means,” tweeted David Bausola to the spambot. And, “You have a few hours left. I hope you enjoy them.”“Just press the off switch,” I e-mailed him. I tapped my fingers on my desk, impatiently. “Jesus.”I was happy to be victorious. It felt wonderful. The wonderful feeling overwhelmed me like a sedative. Strangers all over the world had united to tell me I was right. It was the perfect ending.—Now I thought back on the other recent social media shamings I’d enjoyed and felt proud of. The first great one happened in October 2009. The Boyzone singer Stephen Gately had been found dead while on holiday with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles. The coroner recorded a verdict of natural causes, but the columnist Jan Moir wrote in the Daily Mail, “Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one . . . it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”On Twitter we knew what it meant to be the underdog. And here was a member of Britain’s elite trying to reshame the gay community and choosing the most callous circumstance to do it. We were not going to tolerate a resurgence of old-time bigotry, and as a result of our collective fury, Marks & Spencer and Nestlé demanded their advertising be removed from the Daily Mail’s website. These were great times. We hurt the Mail with a weapon they didn’t understand—a social media shaming.After that, when the powerful transgressed, we were there. When the Daily Mail mocked a food-bank charity for giving a food parcel to their undercover reporter without running an ID check on him, Twitter responded by donating £39,000 to the charity by the end of that same day.“This is the nice thing about social media,” one tweeter wrote about that campaign. “The Mail, which relies primarily on lying to people about their neighbors, can’t cope with people communicating among themselves, forming their own opinions.”When LA Fitness refused to cancel the gym membership of a couple who had lost their jobs and couldn’t afford the fees, we rallied. LA Fitness hurriedly backed down. These giants were being brought down by people who used to be powerless—bloggers, anyone with a social media account. And the weapon that was felling them was a new one: online shaming.And then one day it hit me. Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer—the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way—I would leap into the middle of it. I’d investigate it close up and chronicle how efficient it was in righting wrongs.—I didn’t have to wait long. @Jon_Ronson was put to death on April 2, 2012. Just twelve weeks later, in the middle of the night on July 4, a man lying on his sofa in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was looking for ideas for his blog when he made a very unexpected discovery.TwoIn the middle of the night on July 4, 2012, Michael C. Moynihan lay on his sofa. His wife, Joanne, was asleep upstairs with their young daughter. They were broke, as they always were. Everybody seemed to make more money in journalism than Michael did. “I can never turn it into money,” he’d later tell me. “I don’t know how to do it.”These were anxious times. He was thirty-seven and scraping by as a blogger and a freelancer in a walk-up in a not-great part of Fort Greene, Brooklyn.But he’d just had a job offer. The Washington Post had invited him to blog for ten days. Not that the timing was so great: “It was July Fourth. Everyone was on vacation. There were no readers and there wasn’t a lot of news.” But still, it was a break. And it was stressing Michael out. The stress had just spoiled a vacation in Ireland visiting his wife’s family, and now it was stressing him out on his sofa.—He began hunting around for story ideas. On a whim he downloaded the latest number-one New York Times nonfiction bestseller from the young, handsome, and internationally renowned pop-psychology author Jonah Lehrer. It was a book about the neurology of creativity and was called Imagine: How Creativity Works.The first chapter, “Bob Dylan’s Brain,” piqued Michael’s interest, as he was a keen Dylanologist. Jonah Lehrer was reconstructing a critical moment in Dylan’s creative career—the thought process that led him to write “Like a Rolling Stone.”—It was May 1965 and Dylan was bored, weary from a grueling tour, “skinny from insomnia and pills,” sick of his music, thinking he had nothing left to say. As Jonah Lehrer writes:The only thing he was sure of was that this life couldn’t last. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper he made the same observation: “God, I’m glad I’m not me,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not that.”So Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He moved to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. His plan was to perhaps write a novel.But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling.“It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.”It was no wonder Imagine had become such a bestseller. Who wouldn’t want to read that if they’re creatively blocked and feeling hopeless they’re just like Bob Dylan immediately before he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone”?—Michael Moynihan, I should explain, hadn’t downloaded Jonah Lehrer’s book because he was blocked and needed inspirational advice about how to write a Washington Post blog. Jonah Lehrer had recently been embroiled in a minor scandal and Michael was considering blogging about it. Some columns he had written for The New Yorker had, it turned out, been recycled from columns he’d published months earlier in The Wall Street Journal. Michael was considering blogging on how “self-plagiarism” was considered less of a crime in Britain than in America and what that said about the two cultures.But now Michael suddenly stopped reading. He went back a sentence.“It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.”Michael narrowed his eyes. When the fuck did Bob Dylan say that? he thought.“What made you suspicious?” I asked Michael. The two of us were eating lunch at the Cookshop restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Michael was handsome and fidgety. His eyes were pale and darting like a husky’s.“It just didn’t sound like Dylan,” he said. “In that period, in every interview Dylan did, he was a total asshole to the interviewer. This sounded like a Dylan self-help book.”And so, on his sofa, Michael scanned back a few paragraphs.Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: “God, I’m glad I’m not me,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not that.”In D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back (the missing apostrophe was the director’s idea), Dylan reads an article about himself: “Puffing heavily on a cigarette, he smokes 80 a day . . .” Dylan laughs, “God, I’m glad I’m not me.”How did Jonah Lehrer know that Dylan said this whenever he read about himself in the paper? Michael thought. Where did “whenever”come from? Plus, “God, I’m glad I’m not me” is verifiable, but “I’m glad I’m not that”? When did he say, “I’m glad I’m not that?” Where did Jonah Lehrer get “I’m glad I’m not that”?And so Michael Moynihan e-mailed Jonah Lehrer.I picked up your book and as an obsessive Dylan nerd eagerly read the first chapter . . . I’m pretty familiar with the Dylan canon and there were a few quotes I was slightly confused by and couldn’t locate.This was Michael’s first e-mail to Jonah Lehrer. He was reading it to me back home in his Fort Greene living room. Joanne sat with us. There were toys scattered around.By the time Michael e-mailed Jonah on July 7, he’d pinpointed six suspicious Dylan quotes, including “It’s just this sense that you got something to say,” “I’m glad I’m not that,” and this angry retort to prying journalists: “I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There’s no great message. Stop asking me to explain.”Dylan did once verifiably say in Dont Look Back, “I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There’s no great message.”But there was no “Stop asking me to explain.”Michael mentioned to Jonah his deadline—he was blogging for The Washington Post for ten days—and then he pressed send.—Jonah e-mailed Michael back twice the next day. His e-mails sounded friendly, professional, businesslike, maybe a little superior. His air was that of a smart young academic understanding Michael’s questions and promising to answer them during an appropriate moment in his schedule. Which would be in eleven days. He was on vacation in Northern California for ten days. His files were at his home, a seven-hour drive away. He didn’t want to disrupt his vacation by driving fourteen hours to check his files. If Michael could wait ten days, Jonah would send him detailed notes.Michael smiled when he read out that part of Jonah’s e-mail to me. Eleven days was quite the convenient vacation length given the duration of Michael’s Washington Post contract.Still, Jonah said he’d try to answer Michael’s questions off the top of his head.“And this,” Michael said, “was where it all began to unravel for him. This is where he makes his first underplayed lie. He’s hesitating. ‘Do I make this lie?’”Jonah made the lie.“I got a little bit of help,” he wrote, “from one of Dylan’s managers.”This manager had given Jonah access to previously unreleased original transcripts of Dylan interviews. If there were any discrepancies with common references on the Web, that was why.Jonah’s e-mails continued in this vein for several paragraphs: Dylan had told a radio interviewer to “stop asking me to explain” in 1995. The interview was transcribed within the pages of a rare multivolume anthology called The Fiddler Now Upspoke: A Collection of Bob Dylan’s Interviews, Press Conferences and the Like from Throughout the Master’s Career. And so on. Then Jonah thanked Michael for his interest, signed off, and at the bottom of the e-mails were the words “Sent from my iPhone.”“Sent from his iPhone,” Michael said. “A rather lengthy e-mail to send from an iPhone. Slightly panicky. Sweaty thumbs, you know?”—Who knew if Jonah Lehrer really was on vacation? But Michael had to take him at his word. So they had a lull. The lull made publication in the Washington Post blog impossible, given the digging Michael would need to do. The Fiddler Now Upspoke was a nightmare source: “Eleven volumes, twelve volumes, fifteen volumes. Individual ones cost a hundred fifty, two hundred dollars.”Jonah Lehrer presumably thought Michael hadn’t the wherewithal to trace, purchase, and scrutinize an anthology as epic and obscure as The Fiddler Now Upspoke. But he underestimated the nature of Michael’s tenacity. There was something about Michael that reminded me of the cyborg in Terminator 2, the one that was even more dogged than Arnold Schwarzenegger, running faster than the fastest car. As Joanne told me, “Michael is the guarder of social rules.” She turned to him. “You’re a nice guy as long as everyone else . . .”“When I go out in the world,” Michael said, “if someone throws some garbage on the street, it’s the most senseless thing to me. I lose my mind. ‘Why are you doing this?’”“And it’s for hours,” Joanne said. “We’re out on a nice walk and it’s a half-an-hour rant . . .”“I see things collapsing,” Michael said.And so Michael tracked down an electronic version of The Fiddler Now Upspoke. Well, it wasn’t an actual electronic version, but “a complete archive of all known Dylan interviews called Every Mind-Polluting Word,” Michael told me, “basically a digital version of Fiddler that a fan put together and dumped online.” It turned out that Bob Dylan had given only one radio interview in 1995 and at no time during it had he told the interviewer to “stop asking me to explain.”—On July 11, Michael was in the park with his wife and daughter. It was hot. His daughter was running in and out of the fountain. Michael’s phone rang. The voice said, “This is Jonah Lehrer.”I know Jonah Lehrer’s voice now. If you had to describe it in a word, that word would be measured.“We had a really nice talk,” Michael said, “about Dylan, about journalism. I told him I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself with this. I said I’d been grinding away at this for years and I’m just—you know—I do what I do and I feed my family and everything’s okay.”The way Michael said the word okay made it sound like he meant “barely okay.” It was the vocal equivalent of a worried head glancing down at the floor.“I told him I’m not one of those young Gawker guys going, ‘Find me a target I can burn in the public square and then people will know who I am.’ And Jonah said, ‘I really appreciate that.’”Michael liked Jonah. “I got along with him. It was really nice. It was a really nice conversation.” They said their good-byes. A few minutes later, Jonah e-mailed Michael to thank him once again for being so decent and not like one of those Gawker guys who delight in humiliation. They didn’t make them like Michael anymore.After that, Michael went quiet so he could dig around on Jonah some more.—These were the good days. Michael felt like Hercule Poirot. Jonah’s claim that he’d had a little bit of help from one of Dylan’s managers had sounded suspiciously vague, Michael had thought. And, indeed, it turned out that Bob Dylan had only one manager. His name was Jeff Rosen. And although Jeff Rosen’s e-mail address was hard to come by, Michael came by it.Michael e-mailed him. Had Jeff Rosen ever spoken to Jonah Lehrer? Jeff Rosen replied that he never had.So Michael e-mailed Jonah to say he had some more questions.Jonah replied, sounding surprised. Was Michael still going to write something? He assumed Michael wasn’t going to write anything.—Michael shook his head with incredulity when he recounted this part to me. Jonah had obviously convinced himself that he’d sweet-talked Michael out of investigating him. But no. “Bad liars always think they’re good at it,” Michael said to me. “They’re always confident they’re defeating you.”—“I’ve spoken to Jeff Rosen,” Michael told Jonah.And that, Michael said, is when Jonah lost it. “He just lost it. I’ve never seen anyone like it.”• • •Jonah started repeatedly telephoning Michael, pleading with him not to publish. Sometimes Michael would silence his iPhone for a while. Then he’d return to find so many missed calls from Jonah that he would take a screenshot because nobody would otherwise have believed it. I asked Michael at what point it stopped being fun, and he replied, “When your quarry starts panicking.” He paused. “It’s like being out in the woods hunting and you’re, ‘This feels great!’ And then you shoot the animal and it’s lying there twitching and wants its head to be bashed in and you’re, ‘I don’t want to be the person to do this. This is fucking horrible.’”—Michael got a call from Jonah’s agent, Andrew Wylie. He represents not just Jonah but also Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie and David Bowie and David Byrne and David Rockefeller and V. S. Naipaul and Vanity Fair and Martin Amis and Bill Gates and King Abdullah II of Jordan and Al Gore. Actually, Andrew Wylie didn’t phone Michael. “He got in touch with somebody who got in touch with me to tell me to call him,” Michael told me. “Which I thought was very Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He’s thought to be the most powerful literary agent in the United States and I’m a schlub, I’m a nobody. So I called him. I laid out the case. He said, ‘If you publish this, you’re going to ruin a guy’s life. Do you think this is a big enough deal to ruin a guy’s life?’”“How did you reply?” I asked.“I said, ‘I’ll think about it,’” Michael said. “I guess Andrew Wylie is a bazillionaire because he’s very perceptive, because I got a call from Jonah, who said, ‘So Andrew Wylie says you’re going to go ahead and publish.’”—On the afternoon of Sunday, July 29, Michael was walking down Flatbush Avenue, on the telephone to Jonah, shouting at him, “‘I need you to go on the record. You have to do it, Jonah. You have to go on the record.’ My arms were going crazy. I was so angry and so frustrated. All the time he was wasting. All his lies. And he was simpering.” Finally something in Jonah’s voice made Michael know that it was going to happen. “So I ran into Duane Reade, and I bought a fucking Hello Kitty notebook and a pen, and in twenty-five seconds, he said, ‘I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.’”“And there you go,” said Michael. “It’s done.”—Twenty-six days, and it took Michael forty minutes to write the story. He’d still not worked out how to make money from journalism. He’d agreed to give the scoop to a small Jewish online magazine, Tablet. Knowing how lucky they were, the people at Tablet paid Michael quadruple what they usually pay, but it was quadruple of not much: $2,200 total—which is all he’d ever make from the story.Forty minutes to write it, and what felt to him like nine packs of cigarettes.“If anything, Jonah Lehrer nearly killed me I smoked so many fucking cigarettes out on the fire escape. Smoking, smoking, smoking. When you have the ability to press send on something and really, really affect the outcome of the rest of that person’s life. And the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. There were twenty-odd missed calls from Jonah that Sunday night. Twenty-four missed calls, twenty-five missed calls.”“He kept phoning,” Joanne said. “It was so sad. I don’t understand why he thought it was a good idea to keep phoning.”“It was the worst night of his life,” I said.“Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure,” Michael said.Finally, Michael picked up the phone. “I said, ‘Jonah, you have to stop calling me. This is almost to the point of harassment.’ I felt like I was talking him off the ledge. I said, ‘Tell me you’re not going to do anything stupid.’ It was that level of panic. So much so that I thought maybe I should pull back from this. He was, ‘Please, please, please,’ like a child’s toy breaking, droning, running out of batteries, ‘Please please, please . . .’”Michael asked me if I’d ever been in that position. Had I ever stumbled on a piece of information that, if published, would destroy someone? Actually destroy them.I thought for a while. “Destroy someone?” I said. I paused. “No. I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”“Don’t ever do it,” he said.Michael said he honestly considered not pressing send that night. Jonah had a young daughter the same age as Michael’s young daughter. Michael said he couldn’t kid himself. He understood what pressing send would mean to Jonah’s life: “What we do, when we fuck up, we don’t lose our job. We lose our vocation.”—Michael was thinking of former journalists like The New Republic’s Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a celebrated 1998 story, “Hack Heaven,” about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he’d hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly-on-the-wall in the company’s offices—Jukt Micronics—as the boy negotiated his terms:“I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy—and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!” Across the table, executives . . . are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. “Excuse me, sir,” one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. “Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you.”—STEPHEN GLASS, “WASHINGTON SCENE: HACK HEAVEN,” The New Republic, MAY 18, 1998But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A Forbes digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that The New Republic had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He later enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude, applied in 2014 to practice law in California, and was refused. Glass’s shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pigpen’s cloud of dirt. In some ways, he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike—young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah’s “I’m glad I’m not that” at the end of “I’m glad I’m not me” was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be unfathomable to me. I thought Michael was being overly dramatic to believe that pressing send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass–level oblivion.—In the end, it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together. How could Michael not press send? What would people think if the story got out? That he’d covered it up for career advancement? “I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Author Jon Ronson learned his first lesson about public shaming when his identity was stolen on Twitter. His new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, begins with the story of how some young researchers had forged his identity on Twitter into what they called an “infomorph” or spam bot as an experiment. He found himself “at war with a robot version of myself.”Ronson eventually won his case in a long convoluted process that included a face-to-face meeting with the twisted academicians who claimed that the internet was not, in fact, the real world. Ronson had reluctantly made a video of the meeting and decided his only recourse was to upload it to YouTube. Commenters began crucifying the three identity thieves—some mercilessly—and eventually the academics took down the fake Twitter account.Ronson’s book goes on to explore the concept of public shaming and what it does to its victims in a series of well publicized citizen uprisings that begin in social media. It’s all about the swarm.There was the LA Fitness establishment that refused to cancel the membership of a couple who couldn’t afford to pay their membership after some financial setbacks. Chalk up one for the swarm on social media and a reputation hit for LA Fitness. The trouble with these social media stings is that they do not go away. Every time someone Googles “LA Fitness” the story rears its ugly head. The book is loaded with excellent case studies: journalist and author Jonah Lehrer (faked Bob Dylan quotes in a book), Justine Sacco (infamous PR pro who joked on Twitter she couldn’t get AIDS in Africa because she was white), Lindsey Stone (posted a mocking picture at the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier) and others.“They were being brought down by people who used to be powerless—bloggers, anyone with a social media account. And the weapon that was felling them was a new one: online shaming. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice,” Ronson wrote.The book is fascinating because Ronson interviewed all these victims and told the story about how they lost their personal lives (and even jobs) due to a social media indiscretion from their perspective.Ronson also writes in depth about Michael Fertik and reputation.com. He convinced Fertik to take on the case of Lindsey Stone so he could follow the reputation recovery process through and chronicle the results. What was interesting was that, in the end, Stone gets a version of her life back but she had to become a different person to do so. I will admit I had my misgivings about Fertik’s work, but after reading the book I have developed a professional respect for his company. Unlike others in his sector, he has morals of sorts. The power of reputation as a business asset has long been researched by such organizations as The Reputation Institute, and the need to cultivate a good reputation is now a part of everyday business operations for savvy brands. Some of this cultivation resides in responsible social media behavior.There are an abundance of angles and case studies in this book. It is definitely worth a read for any professional in PR, crisis, or media relations. I also think it is a good read—period. We can all see ourselves a little in this book—our quickness to jump on the bandwagon when someone like Justine Sacco screws up and what happens when unscrupulous writers like Gawker’s Sam Biddle rally the troops to ruin somebody’s life in the name of being a watchdog. He compared his feat of helping to bring down Sacco to the civil rights impact of Rosa Parks. To me, that just cheapens what Rosa Parks accomplished. But, it is Gawker after all.Ronson says of Sacco’s demise: “If punching Justine Sacco was ever punching up—and it didn’t seem so to me given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 Twitter followers—the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground.” Ronson does portray Sacco as a pathetic character in the end—someone whose life will never be the same because of her social media screw-up.But he also takes a look at her social media history and how her habit of sardonic tweets had her walking close to the line before she got publicly crucified. He credits social media and people like Biddle (with large Twitter followings) with creating a feeding frenzy that is fueled by the anonymity and distance created by social media.Ronson wrote about the evolution of public shaming on social media: “In the early days, we watched celebrities for transgressions. After a while, it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot. And the rage that swirled around seemed increasingly in disproportion to whatever stupid things some celebrity had said. It felt different to satire or journalism or criticism. It felt like punishment.”Ronson writes at length about the disproportionate consequences of internet shaming. “Shamings on the internet are not just. They don’t follow the rules of society that you have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It’s worldwide forever.”Maybe the most interesting piece of the book was a chapter on the subculture of kids that hang out on an app called 4chan to organize bullying campaigns. 4chan is mostly an unmoderated bulletin board with everything from bullying to porn to requests for help with cyber-attacks. One 4chan user described her typical cohorts: “a lot of them are bored, under stimulated, over-persecuted, powerless kids. They know they can’t be anything they want, so they went to the Internet. On the Internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.”The scariest characteristic involved in most of Ronson’s stories? People who did not know how to or had no inclination to use their privacy settings on social media. This book is a huge case for social media responsibility education at every age level—from middle school to the corporate world.Perhaps the most disturbing chapter of the book was the explanation of how trial lawyers are taught to shame witnesses to win their cases. In the book, Ronson followed a group of expert witnesses through a workshop on shame avoidance. It doesn’t do a lot to bolster your faith in the judicial system.In the end, Ronson has given us an appalling but realistic look at the culture of public shaming and a road map, with signs, to help us navigate. Highly recommend.

⭐This book is well written, with each anecdote well worded and carefully chosen to move the narrative forward. From a purely literary perspective it was an enjoyable read.The message is extremely liberal, condoning sexually deviant acts such as homosexuality, sado-masochism, marital infidelity, pornography production, and prostitution. He doesn’t even shy away from bestiality. I do not like these things, and their strong presence and positive portrayal in this book, makes me wonder about the author’s personal agendas.Most of the anecdotes are from the author’s personal experience and interview notes so they cannot be easily disputed. He could easily twist or turn the quotes of his interviewees to match his overarching narrative, perhaps deviating them from their original feeling. However there is no way to know.I was hoping for some sort of conclusion at the end about the origin or nature of social shaming. I couldn’t find one, and was a bit disappointed.

⭐I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It’s relevant and thought provoking. While I don’t do a lot of public shaming on social media, myself, I can’t say I’ve never done it. This book prompted me to not only ask myself why I felt I was justified in participating in the shaming but also forced the issue of looking at things from the perspective of the shamee and the damage it can cause in one’s life.While public shaming isn’t new – and Ronson does get into a brief overview of this cultural/societal phenonmenon at certain key points in history – it’s experienced a resurgence thanks to social media… only now, we have the ability to shame people all over the world rather than be limited to our communities. It puts me in mind of the episode from the Black Mirror series where every interaction with every person we encounter is rated on a scale of 0 to 5 stars – and your rating either opens or closes opportunities for the individal to buy certain kinds of cars, shop at certain kinds of stores, rent apartments or houses in certain kinds of communities. In a way, it’s not a far fetched notion. We are moving in that direction. The pros are that we’re more mindful of how we interact with others – because everything has the potential of being caught on camera, video or screenshotted. The cons are that the more we become aware of this, the less spontaneous and natural and more artificial we become in our lives in interactions with others.Ronson points out that shaming has always been a tool used by individuals and communities to keep others within the family, social group or community in line with generally agreed upon social norms of attitude and behavior. However, conversely, he describes a study that indicated people who fantasized about murdering another person were motivated to do so for a common reason: they felt humiliated by that person. I found that especially thought provoking and when I evaluated my own reasons for fantasizing about doing similar, it was true. The bottom line reason was that I’d felt humiliated in some way by that person.If public shaming keeps people’s behavior in line – after, in some cases, nearly destroying their lives or, for observers, offered as an example of a cautionary tale of what not to do – when shamed and humiliated, it can make one want to act out further to retaliate in order to get even. A vicious cycle is created – like the Ouroboros serpent who eats his own tail. Very interesting to contemplate.I gave the book 5 stars… but if it were an option, I’d give it 4.5. I felt the book ended abruptly and without some kind of summary or speculation of where we go from here. Maybe that’s too much to ask though. This is where we’re at, it is happening and it only seems to be getting more and more prevalent as technology, social media, CC TV, smartphones with video capability and other recording devices advance. There’s no way to not be seen. It provokes the realization that we need to constantly be aware and on guard of what we post, what we say, what we do – because you never know who’s watching, how it’ll be interpreted and how it could have far reaching and lasting ramifications for our lives.The Eye of Providence – the all-seeing eye of God that reminds us that all man’s thoughts and deeds are always observed at all times, everywhere. We have usurped the role of the idea of god and become one another’s judge, jury and executioner. We have become the Eye. Kinda scary.

⭐I had no idea who Jon Ronson was or what he’d written before so I came to this book with no preconceptions. It seems that those who did know him from previous books have struggled with the change of direction represented by ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ but I found it fascinating, entertaining, and a compelling ‘page turner’. Similarly I didn’t know of most of the case studies he described – the writer who ‘made up’ Bob Dylan quotes, the PR lady who tweeted an off-colour remark about AIDS, the girl whose goofy photo taken at a military cemetery led over a million people to google her name, or the tech nerd whose childish comments about ‘big dongles’ lost him his job and led to Twitter evisceration of the woman who ‘outed’ him.The books shows us how a thoughtless sentence, a careless statement or a moment of just not thinking before you hit the keyboard can lead to both famous and unknown people getting ripped apart online. It also offers us ‘real world’ cases of attempted shaming that didn’t go as expected such as Max Mosley taking a national newspaper to court for claiming his sadomasochistic sex session with 3 sex workers in uniforms was a ‘Nazi’ reenactment – Mosley didn’t care who knew about his sex life but refused (due to his infamous father Oswald Mosley) to have any association with the Nazis.There’s a lot to think about in here. Several times the author suggests that the only way to survive in the modern world is to be totally bland and unnoticeable. At a time when the so-called ‘Leader of the Free World’ takes to Twitter like a scorned teenager with no behavioural ‘filters’, this book shows us the importance now, more than ever, of thinking before we speak/tweet/write, and of our responsibility to manage our online and real world reputations.

⭐This definitely shone a light on the absurdity of public shaming and how social media transformed from a comforting place to share things you enjoyed with like-minded people without any pressure, to a cold, cruel and merciless crowd patiently waiting for you to slip up and then hurt you for it. As a young person on social media I’m sure I’ve taken part a couple of times, but honestly I tend to find pointless drama uninteresting and often don’t get involved. But I do notice ridiculous shamings and I do feel afraid to say what I really think of them. Which is why the ‘your privileged and therefor have no say’ argument makes little sense to me. Perhaps in some scenarios its a justifiable response, but if the issue really was about discrimination and free speech then why silence others based on their race and background too? Its another tool to silence anyone outside the faceless crowd. I found the backlash you talked about toward the end unnecessary, especially since it was clearly written by those who didn’t read one word of the book.On another note, the way you structured this book, and the way you handled these sometimes quite sensitive topics alongside funny, witty commentary was so engaging and made for a really enjoyable read. Will definitely recommend, and hope people start changing soon. I’m getting really sick of the poison that is social media.

⭐Social media is fantastic, but it hardly needs saying that it has some pretty awful characteristics. For a start, if you make a mistake by, say, making an offensive joke, or even saying something that is open to misinterpretation, it is very public. And also, the web doesn’t forget.In this very readable book, Jon Ronson interviews people who have been publicly shamed or, in the case of a teenaged girl who committed suicide, a close relative.Not all public shaming takes place online. The girl just mentioned felt very humiliated during the trial of the boy who raped her. (I remember reading about this at the time.)In fact, although the book is readable, it is also very uncomfortable to read. And what makes it even more uncomfortable is the realisation that when you ‘call someone out’ online as the current jargon has it, you could be the instigator, or one of the participants of, a process in which someone is tried and found guilty by ‘the mob’ — sometimes without their even being aware of it at the time. You may object to being labelled as one of a mob, especially if you have only three followers on Twitter. But as Ronson says: “The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche”.Ronson is a very good writer, in that he brings some humour and humility to the subject matter. He also manages to end each chapter on a cliffhanger — which is quite annoying if you need to get other things done!There is just one area in which I think Ronson is not forceful enough. He says:”unpleasant as it will surely be for you, when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices – that’s democracy.”It’s a natural human instinct, I think, to wish to ‘stand up for’ someone, but there are two other considerations as well. In my opinion, standing by while someone is accused, tried, found guilty and punished sullies the online community. I know of a couple of online forums in which people are pounced upon for no other reason than expressing a contrary view to the majority. It’s impossible to have an intellectual or even a merely intelligent discussion in such a negatively febrile atmosphere.But even if one were to be completely self-centred in such matters, if you don’t support some hapless victim, who do you think will support you when it’s your turn? And have no doubt: probably one day it WILL be your turn.

⭐I have had no life for the last 8 years. My website was policed by a stranger, who then gathered recruits and online shamed me for something really trivial. Even though I resolved the issue, he hacked into accounts and so I moved. He was obviously still monitoring me as another trivial event happened and he recruited another set of people and online shame me again, the messages I received were pretty nasty and now talk about sodomy. They monitor the net for anything, my uncles obituary, anything I am a member of and get me kicked out, contacting ex employers, any forum I might join and I cannot get help to stop it. The quote from Mike Daisy is just how I feel and I know they keep monitoring me. I have no life which is why this book resonated so much with me.

⭐I’m not sure where I first came across #jonronson perhaps, a #tedtalk I remember feeling compelled to buy #soyouvebeenpubliclyshamed as I listened.Well, it took some time but I finally got around to reading it.I *love* Ronson’s fantastically engaging writing, he draws you into the stories, you hear his voice in his words and you feel what he feels as you read.That is incredibly important when it comes to this book. If you’ve ever said something on social media and been leapt on by the screaming masses or been one of the faceless shamers hidden by anonymity or for anyone that has ever been on social media; READ THIS BOOK!!It has been invaluable in many discussions I’ve been having on social media and I have been referencing it weekly if not daily! Even on LinkedIn the bad faith detractors will pick the slightest hole in a comment or a post and come for you with sharpened knives baying for blood.This is not a guide to save you but will allow you to bring some rationality to the whole thing.10/10 and all the stars from me

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