The book is very enlightening about how the public shaming works. I’d like to freshen myself up by regrouping it into three questions. What motivates shamers to lash out? How individual acts evolve into group madness? What can shamees do to find a way out of it?
Thanks to internet, we are bestowed the power that we’ve never had before and wield it to an unwitting end. The less voice we have in real life, the more stern we tend to become when finding a target online. This can be malicious, or simply motivated by a desire to do something good. I think the latter one speaks for the majority of people. The problem is we don’t realize how far we can go. We take the roll as a presiding judge, but are unaware of the consequences. Do they deserve the punishment of lives being ruined? If not, should we take the blame? Like Jon Ronson sharply pointed out, “the snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.” And this leads to my second question.
More succinctly put, it should be mass destruction instead of group madness. Ronson here unveiled some interesting facts that really blew me away. The notion of group madness was first presented by Gustave Le Bon. His idea was that humans in a crowd lose control of their behavior and a contagious madness takes over. I still remember how thrilled I was when reading Le Bon’s signature work: The Crowd. It seems so solid a fact that people lose reasoning and are easily manipulated by designing parties. What I didn’t expect is Le Bon’s presumptuous bias against females, but it digresses from our topic here, so I’ll just focus on his core theory, which was reinforced by a psychology experiment carried out by Philip Zimbardo en 1971. Twenty-four applicants were split into two groups, prisoners and guards. The prisoners got so violent that the experiment had to be abandoned six days later. But as Ronson dug deeper, he discovered that there was only one prisoner who turned volatile and he only did it to pander to the researcher. So the experiment actually couldn’t prove anything, let alone support for group madness. Furthermore, Jonson thought that frenzy may be contagious within a group defined by similar class and power, but never a randomly mixed community. There are always patterns. Thus contagion can’t take responsibility for online attacking, which is often spontaneous.
What might be the answer? Ronson shifted his attention onto the Your Speed signs. The idea is really esoteric. It’s just a sign that tells your speed aligned with speed limit with no punitive follow-up. People drive by, see the signs, and unexpectedly slow down. How this mechanism works? Ronson reached a conclusion of feedback loops. Reading signs is like you get instant feedback for a decision of whether to go on like before or slow down, and people tend to choose the latter. It means we can be placed in a weird circle in which our beliefs get more and more enhanced by people with same views. This can be utterly dangerous, like when an online shaming happens. We drop charges against people we think of as monsters and get congratulated for this. Decision made, belief strengthened, justice served. Unconsciously we sack people who think differently. It sounds virtually inconceivable. How come in a supposedly more liberal than ever age we get most rigid and conservative? It’s like my resonance for Le Bon. His work strikes a chord and intensifies what I believe. I’m actually pleased with what I’ve already known. My mind is constrained by two cabinets, known knowledge and limited imagination. This leads to a narrow and unsurprising world.
While we fall into traps without realizing it, victims on the other end of internet get tarnished for stupid impropriety. How can they escape from this angry carnival? Ronson gave an interesting case. Max’s life didn’t change one iota. He thought that was because he refused to feel ashamed. But later Ronson came to realize that Max survived the shaming because there had been no shaming. Nobody cares a man in a consensual sex scandal. In fact, there are companies that can offer service for shamees, rebranding them with massive photos and updates on social platforms. By doing this, they make information against their clients go down to page 2. It might cause repercussion, but it’s also a prelude to full recovery. A piece of side information is funny. Google makes a lot of money from searches for shamees and guardians of justice get nothing. Like Michael Fertik said, “The biggest lie is that the Internet is about you.” It’s actually “about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.” Our hubris also lies in the belief that we view ourselves as people who are different and creative and with choice.
I think the story of Max tells me two things. When we build a pattern, we need to carefully avoid sophistry. They seem true and logical, but are indeed false. The other thing is although this remains a misunderstanding, it’s a plausible mindset. We refuse to take the blame for others. It might help us get back on track. Shame is intrinsically an agonizing pain. Every time we feel ashamed, a part of us was stripped off until our true selves succumb to numbness. To get rid of it, we need to first recognize its existence. Why do we have this feeling? Because we care, care what other people think and say, which actually means nothing. Maybe we can change a way of thinking. This is all adolescent concern. To find a way out of it is to wipe out this fear. But it’s always easier said than done, after all, “we are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?”