Book Review: "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson

I started reading So You've Been Publicly Shamed and my brother also recommended that if I am to read a Jon Ronson book then I should listen to it as well. Honestly, I cannot stand his voice, it's too slow and droning. But here we are. The book is actually really good but would have been better without his narration.

About being 'found out' or 'shamed in the public square' as a fraud, Jon Ronson investigates what it means to be 'publicly shamed' and whether there is any redemption from it. For example: the man who I was actually very aware of that had lied about Bob Dylan quotations and then was found out to be lying about a bunch of his articles being based on truth, Jon Ronson writes about how these people were ultimately found out to be absolute frauds.

He writes about the journalist who found the author out with such precision and brilliance that you cannot help but analyse every different point of the argument from: the author is a fraud all the way to whether this length of public shaming is required. The term 'flogged in the public square' was thrown around when Ronson sat at his screen watching as the author in question made an apology whilst being constantly harrassed on public internet forums and how the entire thing descended into absolute chaos. A witch-hunting crowd out for nothing but blood.

Another story involved a woman who told a tasteless joke on social media about the AIDs crisis in South Africa. Honestly, I would make fun of this woman because when I found out what she had actually said, there was nothing funny about it at all (even though she only meant it as a joke). Sarcasm doesn't work over text, so you should be smart enough to not do it or get off social media. Jon Ronson frames this as a witch-hunt when in reality it was the woman herself who was the idiot thinking that tone could come across in no more than a couple of hundred characters. I honestly think that there are some people so dumb that they should not be allowed to have social media accounts. You can't cry about losing your job after something like that.

The next one was a woman who took a picture of two boys who were making a whispery joke to each other at a conference and made complaints to have them questioned at the event. Honestly, this was a little bit far but there should not have been such a vitriolic attack on the woman who took the photograph and complained. There seemed to be a hate mob against her which though she was technically in the wrong, there was really no requirement for. It only proves that a lot of people, both her and her aggressors, have nothing better to do with their time than police other people - especially those they do not know.

Jon Ronson goes off on this weird tangent about the history of crowd theory and how the guy who came up with it initially, was a raging racist, misogynist and possibly, a homophobe. Ronson goes through not only this theory but also the intricacies of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I'm not going to lie, the book seems to be a bit more muddled than his usual requests and nowhere near as well-written as The Psychopath Test or Them: Adventures with Extremists. Ronson seems to take the main idea and blow it way out of proportion, investigating the intricacies of nonsensical outcomes from history in order to apply it to our own modern public-floggings. Be that as it may, there is an interesting story about a boy who killed someone in a drunken car accident and was forced to talk about it in schools, wear a placard etc. rather than just sit in prison.

All in all, I don't think I liked this book as much as I have liked his others. I think that may have something to do with the fact I listened to it instead of just read it on its own. However, I think that also has to do with the fact that I didn't really care too much for the subject matter. There was no continuity and I didn't feel invested in the story.