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| Where Faceless Commenters Wield The Power to Destroy Lives and Careers |
Faceless commenters with the power to ruin people? Sound familiar? This is a great book with lots of anecdotes and case histories of the mob mentality run amok on social media. Course, unlike the vast majority of mob victims on Absolute Write who did nothing other than disagree with a cyberbully bashing or dare to start an independent press the owners didn't like, Jon Ronson talks about people who might have "had it coming."
Nevertheless, we recommend this book for all those who have been smeared unfairly by Absolute Write, for all those who google their name or book or business and see Absolute Write at the top of the page.
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An Amazon Best Book of April 2015: Author Jon Ronson knows a thing or two about public shaming. When a trio of "academics" hijacked his persona for an infomorph—basically an automated Twitter feed that spewed inane comments about food in his name—he took the fight to the internet, where the virtual, virulent hordes soon compelled the spambot authors to cease and desist. The experience hatched a thought: Once upon a time, if you wanted to participate in a good, old-fashioned public humiliation, you actually had to show up. But as with most everything else, the internet has made condemnation an exercise in crowdsourcing, with today’s angry mobs trading stockades and scarlet for social media and its inherent anonymity.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is Ronson's tour through a not-necessarily-brave new world where faceless commenters wield the power to destroy lives and careers, where the punishments often outweigh the crimes, and where there is no self-control and (ironically) no consequences. On one hand, part of what makes this book (again, ironically) so fun to read is a certain schadenfreude; it’s fun to read about others' misfortunes, especially if we think they "had it coming."
It's like driving down the highway to work one morning and seeing that someone has overnight built a billboard on the highway with your face and name, and beside it are images of a bunch of other people you've never seen and don't know calling you a loser and a fraud and a crook and an idiot and whatever other insult they can think of. You can't get the billboard taken down because a new law prevents anyone from having to take responsibility for it even if they know the whole thing is a lie ..., and you can't sue the people on it because you've found out they are all fake, and every day you have to answer for these insults and hope that sane people will see this kangaroo trial by billboard for what it is and also hope you will not be fired from your job as a result.
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