Chamblee54

When an author has book product, the author gets interviewed. This is how PG first heard of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson. The act of using “the media” to promote book product is a curious analog to shaming. To have the exhibitionism on the wtf podcast, starring the shame-proof Marc Maron, is another item on an overloaded irony buffet.
SYBPS is a work of non fiction. In other words, we take the author’s word that these events really happened. In fiction, you know from the get go that it is a made up story. There are a few sayings about this. A: to tell the truth you need to write fiction. B: life is bad fiction. As a celebrity tweeter said, @mattyglesias One man’s cheap shot is another man’s shaming.
Several of the stories involve people getting caught in lies. There is the story of three academigeeks who created a faux Jon Ronson for twitter. Some of their justifications sounded like this: @Johann_MG The Infomorph isn’t taking your identity. It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic identity. It did not end well for the young men. They were exposed. People on twitter said rude things about them. Currently, another digital infomorph is on twitter. @jon_ronson A Weavr made from wikipedia In response to this video by the real Jon Ronson.
The next story involves a man who invented quotes from Bob Dylan. This is another level of irony … with the wealth of material available about Robert A. Zimmerman, this guy felt the need to make stuff up. The story is by turns amusing and pathetic. The author was paid $20k to give an apology speech, with a giant screen behind him for the unkind twitter comments. Maybe throwing rotten tomatoes would have been kinder.
Justine Sacco made an unwise tweet about AIDS and white privilege. She landed in South Africa to discover herself notorious, and unemployed. The tabloid press said Max Mosley was at a Nazi themed sex party. He sued the paper about the Nazi part, won a settlement, and boasted of being a player. The tabloid newspaper got caught in another scandal, and was shut down.
This being non fiction, Mr. Ronson goes all over the place. There is a $500 a seat weekend seminar on “radical honesty.” There are academics, of various levels of intelligence, who write about shaming, prison techniques, and other trivia. There is a company who floods the internet with flattering stories about you, so that the trash goes to page three of google. There are also more people whose lives were ruined by public shaming. One example is the rape victim who committed suicide after her cross examination.
The star shaming saga is donglegate. (spell check suggestion: congregate) Two young men at a tech conference made a tacky joke. A lady, Adria Richards, took a picture of the young men. Immediately, the picture was on twitter. @adrisrichards Not cool Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles Right behind me.
One of the young men lost his job, only to get another one. Ms. Richards, who publicly fired the first shot from her twitter account, lost her job, and was subjected to a massive amount of abuse on the internet. The 4chan crowd had a good time with Adria Richards.
In her interview with Mr. Ronson, Ms. Richards said she felt that the dongle joke jeopardized her safety. “Have you ever heard that thing, Men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” “People might consider that an overblown thing to say”… She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with eight hundred bystanders” “Sure And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
While researching donglegate, Mr. Ronson talked to some people at 4chan. There was a comment made. It went into the preview copies of the book, but not the final edition. This is part of the the publicity process. Someone took offense at this comment, and made an issue out of it. For more details see this story, File under ‘inevitable’: “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” author Jon Ronson slammed by Twitter-shamers.
In all of these tales, Mr. Ronson’s name was spelled correctly. Some say there is no bad publicity. Whatever is said creates awareness of your product. There is a lot of awareness for SYBPS, and Mr. Ronson, right now. ‏@jonronson Feeling incredibly sorry for #RachelDolezal and hope she’s okay. The world knows very little about her, her motives.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Picture #06662 is from “Second International Pageant of Pulchritude and Eighth Annual Bathing Girl Revue, May 21, 22, 23, 1927, Galveston TX.”