Online public denunciation as recursive social practice

Abstract

Incidents of online public shaming commonly start when a record of conduct that is perceived as transgressive by either one of the parties to that interaction or a third party observer is posted, in the form of a narrative description, photograph, audio/video-recording, screenshot, and so on to an online platform, followed by viral amplification of that online public denunciation post through sharing by others within and across platforms. Building on an analysis of 26 incidents of online public denunciations of public incivilities it is argued, in this paper, that public denunciations essentially involve inviting networked audiences to denounce entextualized moments of conduct, which are recontextualized as not only morally transgressive, but as also warranting public condemnation. It is proposed that the procedure by which online public denunciations are accomplished is thus recursive, as it not only involves the ascription of action to prior conduct of the target in question that construes that prior conduct as transgressive, but the embedding of the ascription of that complainable action within a public denunciation that invites condemnation of that ascribed action. However, since social media platforms allow for the re-entextualization and subsequent recontextualization of prior posts through which public condemnation has been invited, online public denunciations are themselves inevitably open to recursive recontextualization. It is concluded that online public denunciation is thus an inherently recursive form of social practice.