I have a review of Jon Ronson's new book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. You can read my review here, and you can buy Ronson's book here (it comes out tomorrow; I recommend it highly if you are as horrified as I am by the ways in which Internet mobs have behaved over the last few years).
One thing I didn't have quite enough space to get into, but can here, is that we are poorly served by conflating every public shaming, as if they're all equal. Here's a paragraph from Jesse Singal's introduction to her brief Q&A with Ronson in New York magazine:
Jon Ronson hung out with a lot of recently fired people while writing his new book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which is out next Wednesday. Justine Sacco, who infamously tweeted an insensitive AIDS joke that went viral while she was on a flight to South Africa, got fired for it. Lindsey Stone got fired for a Facebook photo of her flipping the bird at Arlington National Cemetery. Jonah Lehrer got fired for plagiarism. "Hank" was fired for making a dick joke about a "dongle" to a friend at a tech conference. The woman who got Hank fired by tweeting her displeasure about the joke — the tweet included a photo of Hank and his friend — was fired as well.
As I noted in my review, it doesn't seem right to lump together Sacco, Stone, Dongle Joke Guy, and Dongle Joke Guy's Nemesis* in with Lehrer:
It’s fair to say that others were a bit more deserving of their shaming. Ronson’s second and third chapters deal with the tale of Jonah Lehrer, the wunderkind at the New Yorker whose best-selling pop science books and columns were found to be rife with journalistic sins, both venial (self-plagiarism) and mortal (quote fabrication). Lehrer’s destruction culminated in a speech at a journalism conference in which he offered a wholly unconvincing "apology" as hate-filled tweets, penned in real time, appeared on a screen behind him.
Ronson is employing a bit of rhetorical trickery here by conflating the ordeals of Justine and Jonah. One’s career was ruined over a failed joke that had nothing to do with her profession; the other’s was torn down because it was built on a foundation of fraud.
Lehrer is a guy who built a fantastic career out of sometimes sloppy, sometimes utterly fraudulent, work. He engaged in an obvious no-no—self plagiarism—while writing for some of the most prestigious news outlets in the nation. And he engaged in career-death-penalty level misdeeds—quote fabrication—in the course of writing one of his books. When Wired asked a NYU professor to look at Lehrer's work for them, this is what he found, according to Poynter:
[NYU Prof. Charles] Seife reviewed 18 posts and found 14 instances in which Lehrer recycled his own work, five posts that included material directly from press releases, three posts that plagiarized from other writers, four posts with problematic quotations and four that had problematic facts.
The point is, simply, that Lehrer's whole professional journey was something of a fraud. He had built a lucrative and influential career out of lying and stealing, out of lazily or sloppily reporting when he wasn't brazenly making stuff up. Here's a guy who, frankly, deserved to lose his job.
Lehrer's situation bears no resemblance whatsoever to the other people mentioned above. Justine Sacco told a joke on Twitter that some people either didn't get or got but still found inappropriate, so she was hounded on social media and lost her job. Lindsey Stone put a photo of herself on social media making fun of a sign demanding silence and respect, so she was subjected to death threats and lost her job. Dongle Guy made a joke at a tech conference to a friend while sitting behind a harpy who thought it her job to subject him to the depredation of call out culture, so he was subjected to much scorn and lost his job. And said harpy herself got caught up in the storm, eventually losing her own job for being such a prat.**
The terrifying thing about Sacco et al is that it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any perceived—but ultimately insignificant—infraction. The power of the mob to destroy is a power wielded with scary capriciousness.
As I note in my review, I imagine Ronson would say that this is all kind of beside the point: that shaming itself, regardless of the "crime" committed, is simply too devastating a punishment to hand down. I just don't agree. And I think those of us who want to engineer a change in the culture—those of us interested in cultivating a norm rejecting the idea that we should fire every individual who cracks a joke on Twitter or idiotically takes a selfie in front of a burnt out building—would be better off focusing on the cases of those who didn't deserve it rather than those who, frankly, kinda did.
*Seriously, the woman who got Dongle Joke Guy fired seems to be the worst person in the entire world. She has no remorse for the mob she whipped up, even after suffering the same fate.
**She really is just the worst, Jerry. The worst. But I'm not including her name here because, honestly, she doesn't need any more bad juju.