So You've Been Publicly Shamed
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books
Jon Ronson's captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.
‘It’s about the terror, isn’t it?’
‘The terror of what?’ I said.
‘The terror of being found out.’
The rise of social media has seen a great renaissance in public shaming. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with that voice? We are mercilessly finding people’s faults, and defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.
Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws – and the very scary part we all play in it.
This edition features a new chapter and interview with perhaps the most famous public shaming victim of all – Monica Lewinsky.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling author Ronson (The Psychopath Test) ruminates on high-profile shaming in the social-media age in this witty work. He interviews disgraced pop-science author Jonah Lehrer, fresh off a hellish apology tour, and the remorseful journalist who outed Lehrer as a plagiarist. PR executive Justine Sacco reflects on her own life, left in ruins after a single ill-conceived tweet, and elsewhere Ronson recounts how an inappropriate comment at a tech convention devolved into bedlam, with online threats of rape and death. For historical perspective, Ronson goes into 19th-century stockades, public whippings, and the theory of "group madness" popularized by Gustave LeBon, inspiration for the controversial Stanford Prison Experiments, in which ordinary students were transformed into sadistic guards. Ronson's explorations also take him to an S&M sex club, a ridiculous "shame-eradication workshop," and a therapy program for incarcerated women run by former New Jersey governor James McGreevey. Ronson is self-reflective and honest about his own complicity in the cultural piling-on he observes, recalling a spite-fueled campaign he orchestrated via Twitter against a journalist. Clever and thought-provoking, this book has the potential to open an important dialogue about faux moral posturing online and its potentially disastrous consequences.
