So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Content

In the introduction, Ronson relates a story of an automated parody Twitter handle, @jon_ronson (Ronson's twitter username is actually @jonronson). The account posts a smattering of food and party-related tweets, none of which are related to the content of the actual Jon Ronson's life. This leads to Ronson asking the bot's creators for its removal, as he believes it to be a spambot. The creators of the account alternatively call it an infomorph, and decline Ronson's request, but eventually agree to meet in person with the author.

Ronson then records the interaction and posts it on YouTube, and is surprised when the reaction is overwhelmingly in his favor. The creators of the spambot, in the wake of the public shame elicited by Ronson's video, finally agree to retire the counterfeit Twitter account.

This experience leads Ronson to re-evaluate other public shamings he's participated in, and the effects these shaming events have on both the shamed and the shaming. He begins by interviewing prominent victims of public shaming on the Internet, and the instigators of these shaming events.

His first subject is Jonah Lehrer, disgraced popular science journalist for The New Yorker and author of the book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Ronson also interviews the journalist who exposed Lehrer's plagiarism and misuse of quotes—Michael C. Moynihan. In the days preceding Lehrer's televised apology at a conference held by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ronson interviews the disgraced journalist while hiking through Runyon Canyon. The public humiliation inherent to Lehrer's apology speech is exacerbated by a large projector screen hung behind his speaking podium and a small television screen viewable to Lehrer, which both display a live Twitter feed of any individual tweeting with the hashtag "infoneeds". A small controversy brews as a result of Lehrer's speech's content, which some describe as arrogant and lacking sincerity. Ronson, who had recently interviewed Lehrer and was asked for thoughts on a draft, admits to having decided not to say to Lehrer before he made the speech that he found it unconvincing. Further social media upheaval occurs when it is discovered that the Knight Foundation paid Lehrer $20,000 for his apology speech. He also interviews Adria Richards, who publicised the faces of two tech developers at PyCon for a joke comparing the technical term "dongle" and the slang term "dong", leading a developer named Hank getting fired and an online backlash that in turn led Richards to get fired from her job (in the book, Hank has found new employment and Richards has not, and Richards holds Hank responsible for her problems because he dared to publicly state that she had gotten him fired in the first place and later reveals conspiracy theories that Ronson ultimately doesn't agree with). Other sections in the book include interviews and coverage of the Justine Sacco incident and a long section about how people can "hide" their negative Google Search results via legal and creative IT mechanics.

Reception

Response to So You've Been Publicly Shamed has been mostly positive. As of August 2016, the book has an average score of 3.9/5 on Goodreads with almost 20,000 total ratings.

Jennifer Latson of The Boston Globe remarked that "Ronson manages to be at once academic and entertaining." Matthew Hutson from The Wall Street Journal stated that the book "raises interesting questions about righteousness, reputation and conformity" but lamented that Ronson's "thoughts remain disconnected musings rather than cohering as a calculus of public shaming's costs and benefits".