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Showing posts from February, 2018

Shame and Social Media

Had I the financial means, I often think I'd be quite content living as a recluse. I prefer spending personal time in solitude. I attribute this to being an introvert, though that is possibly an excuse. This introversion and desire to minimize social interaction on a need-to basis may explain why, to date, I have never had a social media account and have absolutely no interest in doing so. Jon Ronson's  So You Have Been Publicly Shamed  (2015) only strengthens my resolve. Zooming in to the experiences of Justine Sacco and Jonah Lehrer while peppering other relevant anecdotes throughout, Ronson examines and details what he considers to be a resurgence of public shaming, which has historically been used as a form of social control. Ronson argues that this revival of the form, however, is unprecedented in that the viral nature of public shaming via social media, particularly Twitter, has catastrophic effects unlike anything experienced before in history. Informative and eng...