So if you've been publicly shamed, Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed (out next week) is the book for you. After all, what you experience when you've been set upon in social media is a sense of exile from society itself—a teeming form of solitude, in which the considered judgment of people who know you suddenly matters far less than the reckless judgment of people who don't. You are beset by crowds of hostile strangers but you can't help but feel all alone, abandoned not just by your "followers" and your "friends" but also by, well, your friends. You become such an instantaneous minority that you might even think, for a moment, that nobody else in the world has endured what you've endured; the comfort that Ronson provides is the acquaintance of others who have, and then some.
In his book, you will meet, among others, Jonah Lehrer, who gave a speech apologizing for journalistic fabrications in front of an enormous screen that gave people on Twitter the opportunity to call him a sociopath and a pathological liar as he spoke. You will be introduced to Justine Sacco, who embarked on a transatlantic flight after tweeting a racially-insensitive joke and deplaned 11 hours later to learn that a lynch mob of hundreds of thousands of digitally-enabled human beings was calling—successfully—for her to lose her job. And you will meet Ronson himself, who in 2012 was victimized by trolls who impersonated him on Twitter. If what you learn, on Twitter, is that there is always somebody worse than you, what you learn, reading So You've Been Publicly Shamed, is that there is also always somebody worse off. And hey, it helps.
If you haven't been publicly shamed—if, as is more likely, you have experienced the simple and savage joy of public shaming—then the appeal of Ronson's book is a little more complicated. He argues that the culture of public shaming grew out of a utopian ideal of communal punishment: the promise that the elitist miscreants who got away with everything before the Interent now wouldn't get away with anything. With empowerment of the people there would come a people's court, and a democratic reckoning, with hashtags yet. One of the paradoxes of digital modernity is that it makes possible pleasures that are not modern at all, that are indeed atavistic. A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.
Ronson is out to spoil the fun but also to have fun, in the familiar manner of the cheerfully perplexed explanatory journalist. With perhaps more humanity than force, he describes the history of public shaming, of the concept of group madness, and of companies that have sprung up to defend destroyed reputations. He ends by pointing out the censoriousness and conformity bred by the instruments of online free speech, and lands on this line: "We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it."
By becoming the Twitter police we've volunteered to become the thought police: This seems indisputable, even uncontroversial. But what's interesting about So You've Been Publicly Shamed is that it loses interest the further it gets from its scenes of primal horror. Lehrer in front of the vituperative screen; Sacco at the airport: There is simply nothing Ronson can say that can compete with them, because they make you break out in a sweat. So why don't Lehrer, Sacco et al write their own stories? It's when you try to answer that question that you realize why Jon Ronson has to function as their interlocutor and so is indispensable to this simultaneously lightweight and necessary book, a plea for civility that might be too civil for its own good. Ronson survived his episode of public shame. Lehrer and Sacco did not. Their careers did not. They have stories to tell and plenty to say—but really, tweeps, why would anyone bother listening to them?