It's my birthday today! Hung out with people at a brewery yesterday and it ended up being okay. Having to navigate among friends who don't necessary know each other was making me very anxious at first. I haven't had to do that in over a year. Is it worth doing, I wonder. It's a pretty good way of people meeting each other, meeting friends of friends is. A lot of times, people don't seem especially keen on getting to know new people, though. Or it may take several times of hanging out together for things to click. A big bunco party would be nice this Christmas. People can meet without having to talk so much. They can just play a game.
I will probably write more about this (if I haven't already covered it in one of these posts already). Navigating social situations is a challenging, energy-consuming part of life for me.
My husband and I played basketball in the park, yesterday. I was amazed how naturally it came back after not having played for a year. My shot felt the same, the only difference being that my legs and arms felt a little weak. I guess you do something over and over as many times as I've shot a basketball and your body remembers it. Neat.
Blog time!
**SPOILERS**
Ronson, Jon – SO YOU’VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED
Published: 2015
Read: 5/2021
This is a nonfiction book by documentarian and Louis Theroux-y Jon Ronson. (It’s very hard for me to keep his name straight at this point. It’s not Ron Jonson.) He researches and interviews people in connection to public internet shamings. He talks about Jonah Lehrer, who made up some Bob Dylan quotes to make his book on Dylan and creativity more inspirational. There’s Justine Sacco, who made that racist joke and then took a flight to South Africa, unaware that she was blowing up on the internet (in a bad way). There was also Lindsey Stone – who
I hadn’t heard of – who took a jokey picture next to a sign in DC. (The sign had something to do with fallen soldiers.) Each time the internet piled on abuse. Ronson follows up with these people, months later, to see how they’re doing.
It seems like part of the consensus as to why piling on public shaming is okay is the assumption that everyone will forget and the person receiving the pile on will be able to return to their normal life – if slightly chastised and hopefully changed for the better. But the thing is, whenever someone googles that person’s name, they’ll get a face full of the public shaming. The internet doesn’t forget, not really. Every new job interview or date or linkedin request could come with that google search. Opportunity over. Ronson’s conclusion is that public shaming on the internet over things as minor as offensive jokes will lead us to a more bland and conservative time.
I went ahead and called Justin Sacco’s joke racist. I get where Ronson’s coming from in his interpretation of it – the joke is meaning to make fun of an insular and privileged perspective, assuming that no one would believe that someone would actually think that the color of their skin would protect them from a virus. But she’s white and able to fly intercontinentally and being jocular around the topic of AIDS. Anyways.
I think people online (and offline) are frustrated that racism is still a thing. That other people disagree with their worldview. That things aren’t really going the way they hoped. It’s complicated and hard to get to the root of a problem (there’s probably not one root anyway), so instead of taking on structures and institutions, we think that if we could just get every individual to fall inline that we’d be welcomed into a bright utopia. We think individual racist holdouts are the problem, so if we think we see one we obliterate them. We want our neighbors to behave.
The book also made me (inevitably) nervous about my own potential to incur the internet’s wrath. I say things without worrying too much about the consequences. I try to be funny or maybe provocative just because. I figure there’s safety in obscurity, but as I’m trying to build a career in writing, I of course will be googled by potential collaborators or representation. I should probably be more mindful of my internet presence in general.
Rating: ★★★
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