Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 152.44 Ronson, J. 2015 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Library | 152.4 RON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dallas Public Library | 152.44 RONSON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 152.44 Ronson | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | 152.44 Ronson 2015 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | 152.44 RON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... West Salem Branch Library | 152.44 Ronson 2015 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Now a New York Times bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a 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.'
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.
A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people's faults. We are 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.
Author Notes
Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary film maker. His books include Them: Adventures with Extremists, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness, What I Do: More True Tales, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed. The Men Who Stare at Goats was made into a motion picture starring George Clooney in 2009. He will be delivering the opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, United Agents. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The author of works about everyday psychopathologies takes a hard look at the dark side of shaming on social media.This American Life contributor Ronson (Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, 2012, etc.) believes that via social media, we are creating a contemporary version of Hawthorne's Massachusetts Bay Colony, awarding scarlet letters with gleeful viciousness to people who often are more guilty of silliness and indiscretion than they are of any egregious social (or actual) felony. Ronson begins with an incident in his own life: some computer guys who adopted his name on Twitter and tweeted things that the author despised. Then he examines case studies of specific individuals, most of whom he sought out and interviewed. Among them are plagiarists and fabricators (a Bob Dylan biographer who created quotations), a woman who tweeted an insensitive racial comment, a couple of guys in an audience who said noxious things overheard by a person nearby, and a woman who posted a photograph of herself making an obscene gesture at Arlington National Cemetery. Due to the swarms on social media, virtually all of these people lost their jobs, reputations and privacy. Digging into the backgrounds of these stories, Ronson unearths relevant information about shaming in the courtroom (a principal strategy employed by lawyers on both sides), the "unshaming" process (and how it can be very effective with prison inmates), and psychological experiments that show the extent to which humans will go to shame others. He also writes about computer whizzes who, for a substantial fee, can play with your name on Google search so that your indiscretions appear in a much diminished way (several pages down, where most searchers don't look). Another intriguing journey from Ronson, who notes that our social media dark side grows ever darker when we believe we're superior to othersand anonymous. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Is technology moving humankind forward, or does the powerful reach of social media hearken back to the public floggings of the past? The author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (2005) and The Psychopath Test (2011) takes a hard look at modern-day shaming in his provocative new book. Inspired by an episode where a spambot impersonated him on Twitter, Ronson employs his typical investigatory approach to take the reader on a years-long exploration of humiliation via technology, his curious mind pursuing new avenues of inquiry as they open up. He recounts the real-time Twitter shaming of a disgraced author, which was displayed on a feed the author could see as he was making his apology speech; the race-tinged tweet of a public-relations executive that upended her life; and the story behind a Facebook photo that mightily offended members of the military and their supporters. Beyond that, though, he talks to those involved both the people shamed and those who acted as instruments for their humiliation about their motivations, what the experience did to them, and whether they recovered. With confidence, verve, and empathy, Ronson skillfully informs and engages the reader without excusing those caught up in the shame game. As he stresses, we are the ones wielding this incredible power over others' lives, often with no regard for the lasting consequences of our actions.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WELSH JOURNALIST and author Jon Ronson joined Twitter on Dec. 10, 2008. He has since published more than 44,000 tweets - almost 20 each day. He has seen some things. Ronson's new book, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," digs into a strange phenomenon of the participatory Internet. From time to time, it seems as if every user of social media rises up as one to denounce, shame and remove an apparently deserving victim. The first few times Ronson witnessed this, he was intrigued - even exhilarated. "When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool," he writes of his initial reaction: "The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice." Or was it? His view turned gradually darker. Charming Jon Ronson has always made me think of a Kurt Vonnegut character, and not just because his name calls to mind the maddening refrain, from "Slaughterhouse-Five," of "My name is Yon Yonson." Vonnegut ranks among the most moral of male novelists writing in English. His work was a life-or-death struggle to make sense of our stupid, dreadful, hilarious world. It has fallen to Ronson to carry Vonnegut's project from fiction to reality. Ronson's exquisite and Vonnegutian book "Them," published 14 years ago, documented our greatest wing nuts. It is a just barely too whimsical tour through a thick chunk of the extremist universe of conspiracy theorists, from the Klan to the Bilderberg Group jouster Alex Jones to David Icke, who believes giant reptiles rule the world. "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" is populated by a different set of familiar, besmirched names. Justine Sacco (made a joke on Twitter). Lindsey Stone (posted a joke photo on Facebook). Mike Daisey (made stuff up). From the Before Twitter era, Jim McGreevey (really bad governor). Ronson also goes hiking with Jonah Lehrer, the millennial best-selling idea packager who was briefly employed by The New Yorker. Famous now for having two-thirds of his published oeuvre withdrawn, Lehrer had a spectacularly public downfall when his work was found to be riddled with recycling and press-release copying, peppered with plagiarism and inaccuracies and questionably sourced quotations. The Lehrer affair unspooled to unprecedented glee among denizens of the Internet. When Lehrer apologized, poorly - for a $20,000 fee! - they (we?) went extra nuts. Public shamings are often described in this book in terms of physical violence. Tweeters are "a pitchfork mob," according to Michael Moynihan, who unmasked Lehrer; according to Ronson, they are both "the hanging judge" and "the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings." Enough "stabbing," Moynihan says of the people attacking Lehrer: "HE'S DEAD." It's not just Lehrer, either. Twitter users have "taken a lot of scalps," Ronson writes. "We were soldiers making war on other people's flaws." It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street. The actual beating is - surprise! - exponentially worse. Eliding any difference between words and deeds may seem natural to a non-American like Ronson (many European nations have laws against hate speech), but it makes the continuing argument in this country about how to handle offensive language more challenging. Jonah Lehrer isn't actually annihilated, dead or even particularly injured. Not even a year after his alleged digital murder, he sold a book about love and mistakes, and while that one's awaiting publication he has a co-authored book coming out this September. He is still only 33 years old, still represented by Andrew Wylie. Mike Daisey? Just completed a fresh run of evenings at Joe's Pub! Jim McGreevey? Graduated from the General Theological Seminary, doin' great. And Justine Sacco? Eh... What are the actual stakes of shaming? Lurking and somewhat underdocumented in the tales gathered here is the fact that as agonizing as these experiences are, men often survive them just fine. Of the 69 people arrested in a Kennebunk, Maine, prostitution sting, Ronson points out, it was the lone female client who was mocked in town. Along these lines, one of the most captivating stories in the history of the Internet involves an incident that, happily, Ronson covers in depth. At a developer conference, two dudes, "Hank" and Alex, were cracking mildly off-color jokes to each other. Adria Richards, a woman sitting in front of them, photographed them and reported them to organizers. They explained the situation and were released. She tweeted and blogged about it. Hank was fired, then apologized in a public forum. The website of the company where Richards worked was forced down; then she was fired as well. Hank got a new job right away. Richards did not. Instead she spent a year fielding rape and murder threats. But how, Ronson wonders, had Hank's relationship with women developers changed since the incident? "Well," Hank tells him. "We don't have any female developers at the place I'm working at now. So." Ronson is always careful not to overly whittle his conclusions lest they snap under pressure. But he appears to have come to believe two things. One is that people are much kinder in the real world than they are on the Internet. The other is that online, we are "creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland." after this book was finalized but before it was released, the news anchor Brian Williams had to recant a story about being in a downed helicopter. It was a great national opportunity to talk about the role of the news media and about human memory. Kidding! Mostly it was people being total jerks online. At the same time, Adria Richards opened up on Twitter. She had submitted 120 incidents of abuse to Twitter, she wrote - in a single week. They did nothing. After selling her furniture on Craigslist and moving out of her apartment, she found a therapist with experience in PTSD. She was still jobless, nearly two years later, but in February, she announced she had applied for a job - in the user safety and security department at Twitter. She didn't sound as if she'd be holding her breath for an interview. "Be kind, don't hurt" is how Robert Scholes described the whispered message of "Slaughterhouse-Five" in these pages in 1969. Ronson has arrived at this same entirely sane conclusion 46 years later. It's good advice, even if Buddha and a lot of others did get there first. But there's public mockery, and then there's something worse. The experience of women online is the great link between speech and violence, between offense and abuse. For women - and for all gender offenders, from gays to trans people - insult and the threat of murder are issued simultaneously. Like almost every other book, then, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" would probably have been handled better by a woman. Often we send a married, middle-aged man who makes $250,000 a year (half a million in a good year, apparently) to do the job. It's fine! Ronson is a sweet and particularly talented man. But the actual problem with the Internet isn't us hastily tweeting off about foolish people. The actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar Internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats. We are 'creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.' CHOIRE SICHA is the author of "Very Recent History" and a co-founder of The Awl.
Library Journal Review
When Ronson discovered a Twitter-bot impersonating him (discussing food he hadn't eaten, social engagements he hadn't attended, and rude dreams he hadn't experienced), the author tracked down those responsible and subjected them to his online fans' wrath. This weird and hilarious experience serves as a jumping-off point for a fascinating discussion of how the net serves as a pillory in the 21st-century village square, sentencing those who commit social transgressions to often severe punishment at the hands of the public. Ronson interviews Justine Sacco, Jonah Lehrer, and less-well-known subjects of Internet shaming, examines theories of mob psychology, attends a radical honesty workshop, and follows one woman through the process of Internet reputation restoration. The book examines how and why society engages in public shaming, what happens to those who've experienced it, and whether they deserved it. The author's narration turns on a dime from deadly serious to deadpan funny and keeps the listener engrossed throughout. VERDICT Recommended for enthusiasts of Internet culture and fans of the author's previous work and of narrative nonfiction.-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
1 Braveheart | p. 1 |
2 I'm Glad I'm Not That | p. 13 |
3 The Wilderness | p. 33 |
4 God That Was Awesome | p. 67 |
5 Man Descends Several Rungs in the Ladder of Civilization | p. 91 |
6 Doing Something Good | p. 111 |
7 Journey to a Shame-Free Paradise | p. 137 |
8 The Shame-Eradication Workshop | p. 157 |
9 A Town Abuzz over Prostitution and a Client List | p. 177 |
10 The Near Drowning of Mike Daisey | p. 191 |
11 The Man Who Can Change the Google Search Results | p. 205 |
12 The Terror | p. 231 |
13 Raquel in a Post-Shaming World | p. 239 |
14 Cats and Ice Cream and Music | p. 263 |
15 Your Speed | p. 275 |
Bibliography and Acknowledgments | p. 283 |