So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Written and Narrated By: Jon Ronson
Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
Deep and fraught; shallow and histrionic: Ronson always, ALWAYS provides a hilarious descent into Hell
It all starts for Jon Ronson when a spambot assumes his identity on Twitter, and suddenly it starts tweeting about all things foodie. At first Ronson is bemused, then he’s irate. This is NOT who he is: What is all this anyway?!?
And so he gathers the creators of this faux Jon Ronson, has them sit in a row on a sofa, and he records their refusal to take the spambot down. Ronson then posts this interaction online, hits Send, then sits back to wait for the world’s response. He’s thrilled as there is disbelief, then outrage. The world is firmly behind him, and he crows with delight.
Then the responses start getting more vicious, more violent. And he hopes nobody’s going to get hurt.
From here, then, is where he starts wondering about the mob online and how the crowd can be vicious. Actions which in the Puritanical past would’ve meant four hours in the stocks, and forty lashes in private, are now completely abominable… and unforgivable… in this era of online damnation.
Ronson follows those who’ve committed somewhat minor infractions such as self-plagiarism and the making up of low-key quotes, those who’ve made questionable and possibly only-tasteless jokes and tweeted them out, and those who’ve made playful yet p’raps a bit ill-advised attempts at humor and posted them on their social media accounts. And they’ve all been smacked upside the head with a harsh societal 2-by-4, have lost their jobs, lost their good names, lost families. Public shaming has arrived to this digital age of ours, and the crowd is not forgiving.
I read one review of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed that faulted it for being a shallow smattering, and I do understand that. Tho’ I don’t agree with that reviewer likening Ronson with a pop sociologist, I do agree that Ronson is all about getting instances rather than major depth jotted down. He goes from shame victim to shame victim, from horror to horror, yes. But he also goes into shame itself, why we feel it, what it can make us do (Think that amoral murderer… turns out abysmal parenting, a childhood of torment and shame, can make a person numb to atrocity, feeling a semblance of “good” only upon getting the respect earned when he points a gun to somebody’s head and they beg…). And Ronson even follows one prior shamed individual who now runs a floor at a detention center where inmates are given work, and literature, and education, and support, thus turning their lives around. Then too, Ronson jumps into the porn industry where shaming is turned on its head, and the porn stars embrace that which might be seen as intolerable (Brief aside: Many ex-porn industry workers go on to work in hospice care: Being soooo well-acquainted with the body and all its functions has them completely at ease with the many ways a body can break down). So, as with all Jon Ronson’s studies, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed has a bit of everything.
I included the book for this week where I tacked on additional awesome narrators to last week’s Awesome Narrators Extravaganza cuz I do soooo loooove Ronson’s style of delivery! Only he can deliver lines where he shouts! he staggers! he cries out in dismay! Listening to a Jon Ronson performance of a Jon Ronson piece of journalism is like being trapped in the man’s head right there with him—he does NOTHING if NOT think himself into a full-blown tizzy at even his most rational moments. Dude, the man thinks too much, feels way more than is good for him. And it’s all a hoot!
Always enjoyable, even when this shows how people get caught in feedback loops whereby they strike out at those being shamed, discover they are not alone and continue the Pile-on, getting more and more vicious, offended even when they are in no way the injured party, this audiobook is imperfect only in that I could’ve listened to many more hours of it. Ronson, I s’pose, believes in brevity, however, so I had to satisfy myself with barely 7 1/2 hours at x1.2 listening speed (It would be fine, oddly enough for me, at x1, but I like the way the increase in speed makes him sound just that much more hysterical with confusion at times…!).
I’ll just have to wait for Ronson’s next work. But in the meantime, I’ll monitor public shaming with a more jaundiced eye, will watch in horror as we continue to eviscerate one another.
Good thing Ronson is hilarious; otherwise? I do believe I might’ve wept…
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