Maybe stating the obvious, but it's fascinated me for a while how online interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the interactors' imaginary constructions of each other - there's so little of a person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination ('fantasy', 'projection', or whatever) is required in considerable degree for there to be any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor's mind.<p>And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.<p>Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.<p>By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!
My rule for social media is the following: only go when you know exactly what you're looking for.<p>The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends. This having been said, I'm now clearly in a professional environment, so I think about what I'm writing.<p>I walk through twitter in the same way I walk through the ghetto: mouth shut and head on a swivel. I'm not going to start disseminating my political opinions as if the average twit gave a damn.
Social Media seems like the adult version of high school all over again. You have the bullies and popularity contests. Jon Ronson was one of the unfortunate who tried to tell the crowd that they shouldn't judge, and instead became one of the kids being picked on.
This seems to be a follow-up to his earlier article <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...</a> (and also his book "So you've been publicly shamed").
I will relish the day when the Internet Outrage Machine becomes sloppy enough to fall on its own sword, repeatedly.<p>When that happens, we might see a countervailing trend wherein the internet largely turns against that type of behavior—likely via way of directing outrage and shaming towards those who engage in outrage and shaming.<p>Ideally, the dynamic would be kind of like a snake eating its tail.
The Justine Sacco story has an interesting follow up here:<p><a href="http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i-came-to-pea-1653022326" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i...</a>
Just a point - let's not call 'shaming' what might be 'harassment' or worse.<p>Shaming someone attempts to make them feel bad about their actions. Attempting to get someone fired, and spamming them with threats is not shaming...
I've been on forums where people said the most atrocious things to each other. But there was never any come back from it because A) The audience was relatively limited and B) None of us used real names or spread out ID around too widely.<p>You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.
Ronson's a cogent writer, but I can't help think he's suffering from cognitive dissonance. Perhaps because he still clings hopelessly to the idea that the modern concept of "social justice" is somehow beneficial, he keeps trying to find excuses for why mobbing, shaming, hate mobs, rushes to judgement and so forth could theoretically be okay in some situation and so we shouldn't consider such behavior automatically bad.<p>To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.
I find similar things in youtube comments, facebook threads etc. A facebook page or youtube video with, say, pro Israel message gets a mob of commenters shouting down anyone who speaks about the plight of Palestinians. Meanwhile a page or video about "occupation" will have a mob shouting down anyone who speaks about Israel's right to exist. Very few in the mob actually make point by point rebuttals or even actual sense.<p>The same can be seen in religious forums, atheists, etc. Try to post in a religious stackexchange - with the notable exception of judaism.stackexchange.com your post is likely to be censoredor heavily modified if it's too critical or raises inconvenient issues.<p>At least, sites like quora and stackexchange have rules that tend to promote a clean end result, with quality answers. On social sites like facebook, however, things usually devolve into over 90% "bad" argumentation as defined by paul graham.<p>I think there is some internet study that anger and outrage motivates people to respond more than good things.<p>On Twitter, where people shout into the void and most people in the mob don't have a reputation to carefully manage, you can attract even more angry crap.<p>On YouTube it's the same principle - comments are public so the angry confrontations with low wuality argumentation are more likely.<p>The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P
It is pretty clear that as a species, our group dynamics have both pro- and contra- modes that can be applied by the group towards the individual. Its a sliding scale .. we eat our martyrs and pamper our sinners, alike.<p>Its cases such as this one that remind me personally that you cannot trust a mob, a crowd can be as banal and base as any wild animal, and groups need guidance to be of benefit to the individual cells which form the whole. There are no guarantees with the mob - strength, unity, enterprise - these must all be applied towards the effort to prevent the mob from consuming itself. Humans are cannibalistic - if not digestively, at least figuratively - and we form whatever cultures we can select from the infinite void in order to undo this cannibalistic urge. But yet, still it persists.
Welcome to twitter. It's completely unclear to me why anyone would use it, especially after writing a book about how using it wrong can get you fired and ruin your life.
I dont't see how there is more outrage and shaming on social media than in the real world. Empathetic and benevolent behaviour could be expected when Twitter was a small community. Would everyone get Justine Sacco "joke" if she was yelling it in the streets ?
Sometimes shaming is good. The drought shaming in California actually helped the biggest wasters cut down on their water use more than any fines would (they are too rich to be disuaded by fines).
He should actually just give this a rest. The article does not contribute to the discussion, it just further plugs his book.<p>She was terribly wronged but no one else keeps bringing her up except him, for obvious financial gain.<p>If he has something new to say then great, but cherry picking ridiculous tweets out of thousands of them, many of them complete trolls, only gives voice to an obviously ignorant minority.
I am really bothered by the expression ‘the online hate mob’, as if this was a consistent and coordinated group of people who have an active and positive role in hatred.<p>It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those arguments were openly dismissed.<p>“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.<p>That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.