On the Internet, when all the social context is stripped away and you don’t even have to look at the face of the person you’re being mean to, shame loses its social, restorative function. Shame-storming isn’t punishment. It’s a weapon. And weapons aren’t supposed to be used against people in your community; they’re for strangers, people in some other group that you don’t like very much.
Ronson’s critics are appealing to the small-group uses of shame: moral enforcement, shaping communities, taking power from the offender and giving it to those who have been wronged. And yet, shame isn’t being administered the way a small community would do it. Outrages are identified using the least charitable, most literal possible reading of what someone wrote or did, rather than trying (as a small group would) to think of what they could have meant by it, giving them the benefit of the doubt where two readings are possible. Things that were stupid and thoughtless are turned into deliberate outrages that could only be the work of hardened psychopaths. In part, that’s because Twitter gives us none of the social cues that a face-to-face encounter would deliver; we can’t hear their tone of voice or see the look in their eyes that gives you clues about their state of mind. But it’s also because it’s a lot easier to imagine the worst of some faceless stranger — and to say rather incivil things yourself.
That is not the whole of Twitter outrages, of course; many things that are castigated eminently deserve to be condemned. But because shame-storms easily blow up around things that were unlikely to be meant the way people often take them, we often demand that the putative offenders feel remorse for crimes they don’t feel they committed. And in the heat of the shame-storm, there is no way for them to explain themselves, or for others to explain exactly what it is they did wrong.
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