So You've Been Publicly Shamed

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015) by Jon Ronson is a nonfiction exploration of the phenomenon of public humiliation in the era of social media. Ronson is an immersive journalist, newspaper columnist, and documentarian who has written about a wide variety of fringe social contexts, including extremists, people who have psychopathy, military experiments with paranormal powers, and the pornography industry. Ronson assesses each of these topics, including humiliation on social media, through case studies, interviews, and on-location reporting. The book’s style is part journalism, part self-reflection, and uses humor to approach its subject. Its main themes are the Causes and Effects of Shame and Humiliation, Justice and Redemption, and Shaming in Print and Social Media.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed ultimately argues against judging people online too swiftly or harshly for their behavior. Ronson further examines this topic in his Audible Original podcast series The Last Days of August (2019) about a pornography actress who died by suicide after becoming the target of online shaming.

This study guide uses the 2016 paperback edition of the text with a new afterward from Picador Press.

Content Warning: The source material includes discussions of sexual assault, misogyny, violent threats, child abuse, racial stereotypes, Holocaust imagery, and suicidal ideation. Additionally, the source material occasionally references offensive terminology for women, sex workers, and LGBTQ+ individuals, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotations of the source material.

Summary

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed seeks to better understand the use of public shaming as a tool for pursuing justice, particularly in the era of social media. Ronson’s work begins with his own instigation of a mass public shaming online in order to get people to change their behavior. This leads him to investigate this phenomenon more generally, as well as shaming in the traditional media and the criminal justice system. To understand public shaming better, Ronson interviews subjects who have either perpetuated or been on the receiving side of public shaming. He also gains firsthand experience to better understand his own motivations and reactions to this type of behavior. Finally, to contextualize his work, he uses archival and traditional research to trace the history and evolution of public shaming. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed questions the utility of public shaming in pursuing justice, as it documents the material and emotional toll it takes on those who are shamed.

The book is divided into 15 named chapters and breaks into three parts. In the first part of the book, Ronson looks in-depth at two case studies of public shaming: the print media shaming of Jonah Lehrer for fabricating Bob Dylan quotes and the social media shaming of Justine Sacco for a joke tweet perceived as being racist and insulting to those with HIV/AIDS. This section highlights the theme of Shaming in Print and Social Media. Ronson interviews both those doing the shaming and those who have been shamed, supplementing his own investigation with archival research and additional interviews to get a better sense of the effects of this process on all sides.

In the second part of the book, Ronson looks at several different cases of shaming in order to better understand the nature of shame and whether it is possible to withstand a shaming. In this section, he is focused on the theme of Causes and Effects of Shame and Humiliation and seeks a way that those who find themselves being shamed can learn to overcome it. Ultimately, Ronson determines that the ability of a subject to overcome the situation is highly dependent on the reason one has found themselves a target of a shaming in the first place.

The third section of the book constitutes Ronson’s exploration of possibilities and methods for how those who have been publicly shamed can achieve redemption, highlighting the theme of Justice and Redemption. A major element of this section is Ronson’s investigation into reputation management companies, which can bury negative media coverage in Google search results by manipulating the algorithm.

In the conclusion to the text, Ronson meditates on his criticisms of the current social media environment and chronicles how the book itself generates a firestorm of criticism around his work: Whereas he had once instigated a public shaming, he now finds himself on the receiving end of one due to controversy over his book. Ronson ends on a call to action, encouraging his readers to show grace toward those who have faced a public shaming and to not take part in the behavior themselves.