Being shamed in front of a crowd of
onlookers can be very painful. Picture
yourself making a mistake at work and your boss pulling you into his office to
criticise you. Now picture your boss
waiting for a large meeting to criticise you in front of all your
colleagues. How much worse would that
be? And what if your boss could record
your shaming and broadcast it all around the world?
An innocent English teacher was once shamed
in a minor way in front of his class of Japanese students. At the end of the lesson, he turned to a
pretty female student, smiled and said, “Have a nice weekend.”
She looked at him somewhat coldly and
replied, “Shame on you.”
There was a short silence. The class wondered why she was so angry. Did she feel that the teacher was trying to chat
her up and was being sleazy?
It turned out that she had actually meant
to say, “Same to you,” and had merely misspoken. But the teacher felt the embarrassment of his
public rebuke quite painfully for a moment nonetheless.
I recently finished a book which suggests
that much larger scale public shaming is gaining in popularity in the internet
age. The book is “So you’ve been
publicly shamed” by Jon Ronson (2015).
Jon Ronson picks out many examples of
people who misspoke, or wrote a badly worded or thought out joke, or broke the
social rules in some minor way, and who were then subjected to a vicious
attack from strangers on the internet.
One example was of an American woman who
often travelled on business. She had a
blog with only a few followers in which she would write cynical jokes about the
countries she was visiting – joking that she might not find anything to eat in
Britain since its food has such a bad reputation, for example.
Just before boarding a plane to South
Africa, she joked that she hoped she wouldn’t get AIDS while in the country,
but that she probably wouldn’t because she was white. It’s not a very funny or appropriate joke,
but it seems clear that she didn’t mean it seriously.
So when thousands and thousands of people
wrote furious messages to her, many people suggested that she should be
violently attacked, and she was sacked by her company before her plane even
landed, the reaction was disproportionate.
As a writer of a blog who often makes
cynical or silly jokes, I felt sympathetic.
Reading the book also made me consider more carefully what I joke
about. For example, a big news story in
Japan recently concerns the Emperor.
Many news organisations are reporting that he would like to abdicate. I wondered whether I could find something in
the story to write about before I began to worry that saying something silly
about the Emperor might cause people to get angry. Now you’ll never know my anecdote
about seeing the Emperor one day in Kyoto, and what silly thoughts I might have
had about it.
You can always read Jon Ronson’s silly
anecdotes to keep yourself amused instead.
Vocabulary:
to chat someone up – (informal) to flirt
with someone; to make romantic advances towards someone
sleazy – of a person, vulgar or
inappropriate, especially someone who makes inappropriate sexual advances
a rebuke – a sharp criticism or expression
of disapproval
vicious – deliberately cruel or violent
disproportionate – of a reaction, response
etc., being unequal to the original comment or situation; over the top
to abdicate – of a member of a royal
family, to give up one’s position; to cease to be king, Emperor etc.
an anecdote – a short, amusing story
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