Introducing Online Vitriol

Abstract

In ‘How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life’ (New York Times Magazine, 12 February 2015) Welsh journalist Jon Ronson investigated the effect on victims of public shaming through social media platforms and compared it to the history of public shaming as a form of punishment. Such punishments (the stocks, the pillory, the whipping pole) have gone out of practice, in part because they were considered too humiliating and socially annihilating for the person undergoing the punishment. Ronson finds a clear parallel in the effects of online public shaming in the victims of the present. [...]