So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

“Having a phone conversation with somebody is like reading a novel,” Michael said. “Your mind creates a scenario.

The actual William Dean Howells line is “What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.”

like all journalists, I really love a scoop—a scoop keeps at bay the scream of failure—and

I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this—that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back.

suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise.

As somebody back then wrote, “Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.”

Part of the reason all these kids have become experts on the Internet is because they don’t have power anywhere else. Skilled trade is shrinking. That’s why they went there.

line from Othello came into his head: “I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial.”

Brad’s thinking was that shame grows when we internalize shame.

Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist—the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

It turned out from his survey that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had experienced “at least one vivid fantasy of killing someone.”

There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people.

On Twitter we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren’t being influenced by the criminal justice system or the media. This makes us formidable.

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.

“Shame is an incredibly inarticulate emotion. It’s something you bathe in, it’s not something you wax eloquent about. It’s such a deep, dark, ugly thing there are very few words for it.”