Article:
Chapter Six: Doing Something Good in So You’ve Been Publically Shamed by Jon Ronson
Summary:
In the sixth chapter of his book, the author opens with an account of developers Hank and Adria at Pycon. During a conference presentation, Hank and his colleague were joking together about ‘dongles’ and ‘forking,’ terms that had a clear sexual connotation. In the row directly in front of them, Adria turned around and snapped a photo of the two developers. Not much time passed before Hank and his colleague were pulled out of the room by the conference organizers to discuss their sexual comments. After explaining the situation, not much more came of the situation during the conference.
However, when leaving the event, the two developers soon discovered that Adria posted their photo and the subject of their jokes on Twitter: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon” (pg. 114). To further explain her tweet, she produced a more extensive blog. In conversation with Ronson, Adria further detailed her feelings of danger after hearing the comment from the men behind her.
The repercussions for Hank was termination from his work. Nothing was mentioned about the consequences for his colleague. After being terminated, Hank turned to Hacker News to publicly apologize for his lewd remarks. In his statement, he mentioned the outcomes of his actions – his termination. Adria asked to remove this portion of the apology.
The public jumped into the conversation to both defend and further shame both Hank and Adria. Adria was received rape and death threats while her work was hit by a DDoS attack. The DDoS attackers threatened to continue until Adria was fired. She was shortly fired. Hank was defended and then later insulted by men’s right bloggers. These bloggers focused on Hank’s masculinity – or lacking masculinity. Both the shamer and shamed were harmed by the actions of the crowd.
In the latter half of the chapter, Ronson switches gears slightly by writing about his interview with a 4chan user accused of DDoSing PayPal. According to the author, her motivation for shaming was “the desire to do good” (pg. 123) and stems from a place of powerlessness: “on the internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless” (pg. 123). This place of powerlessness is apparently rooted in violations, namely stop and frisk, of others constitutional rights.
Later, in their conversation about Adria, the 4chan user defends Hank claiming that Adria infringed on his and his colleague’s freedom to speech. And, that in the case of Sacco (another victim of shaming mentioned in Chapter Four), she became the symbolic enemy – rich, white person. The 4chan user claims that some “crimes” –like these – cannot be handled by the courts but by shaming.
Reflection
As we learned, 4chan/b/ is ephemeral, with threads lasting no more than a few minutes and most disappearing from the front page within hours. Because of this, Ronson’s comment that “somebody inside 4chan was silently erasing me whenever I tried to make contact” (pg.121) seems like a misunderstanding of 4chan/b/. If so, a tad more research would have been beneficial instead of misleading readers about the nature of 4chan/b/ users or the level of administration/moderation that occurs on the forum.
In addition, the author’s connection between stop and frisks and online activism seems relatively weak. In the connection to police, Ronson makes the statement that “one by-product of [stop and frisks] was that some repeatedly frisked young people sought revenge in online activism – by joining 4chan” (pg. 126). This statement is based on conversations with only two individuals from New York City. And, in his conversation with Troy, there is no mention that Troy even engages in online activism; his activity on 4chan could simply be to have a free space without interference instead of seeking revenge. Although the evidence supporting the association between NYC stop and frisks and online activism isn’t particularly strong in this book, the notion that powerlessness can translate over into bullying –or shaming more broadly- does make sense.
The conversation about Hank and Adria could have been bolstered with a conversation about guilt. Shame and guilt are different. The former leads to painful feelings about our identities (we feel bad about ourselves), and the latter leads to empathic views about how we behaved poorly as well as the consequential harm. The discussion of guilt/shame could help pull out the issues with shaming a little better to demonstrate why guilting someone might be a better alternative than shaming.
The shameful rather than guilty response can be seen for both Hank and Adria. In Adria’s response, she states: “no one would have known he got fired until he complained” (pg. 129) … and it was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me” (pg. 130). The result of her shaming appears to be defensive and angry rather than empathic and remorseful. Something similar can be said of Hank. In his response to Hacker News, he might not have appeared furiously angry. But his description of distancing from female co-workers shows some alteration to his self-worth. He notes that with female developers, “I’m not as friendly. There’s humor, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate” (pg. 130).
For both Hank and Adria, shame seems counterproductive. I have not finished the book yet, but I hope there is a discussion about shame versus guilt. And, in particular, how the public can elicit guilt rather than shame to help change people’s behaviors for the better.
Questions:
- Is shaming inherently bullying?
- If not, when does shaming become bullying?
- Is shaming justifiable for the greater good?
