If you’d like a taster of what the book is about, Jon gives us some insight in his TED Talk on this subject. Acknowledging social media shamings he has been involved with, I am immediately inspired by Jon’s brutal honesty. Jon describes a number of shaming incidents and the devastating effects that mob justice has had on the victim. The most striking story relates to the incidents surrounding the Twitter shaming of Justine Sacco.
The rise in the level of hysteria generated by platforms like Twitter is a concern. More so when we consider that public shaming is something our society claims to have consigned to history. We have to ask ourselves whether platforms such as this devalue our social collateral. And having read this book, I seriously considered whether I wanted to be part of them, Twitter in particular.