As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport:
“ ’Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”
Then, during her layover at Heathrow:
“Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”
And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town:
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
A good portion of my life plays out online. I post my writing on my blog, and I have Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. In real life, I can be snarky, and a good number of my friends and acquaintances could charitably be described as smartasses (As my oldest stepson once said, “It beats being a dumbass!”). Online, I tend to allow my personality some extra rope, and I’m snarky (and, yes, occasionally self-righteous) in a way I’m not in real life. I’m very aware of this tendency (and that it’s not always an admirable personality trait), and I’m working to be more conscious of what I say and do online. It’s exceedingly easy to blur the lines, and even easier to lose sight of the reality that on the Internet, no one cares about context.
This has been on my mind a lot because of the story in the New York Times Magazine about Justine Sacco. It’s a cautionary tale of what can happen when you make a joke online only to learn that, when stripped of all context, an attempt at what you think to be humor can cause a good deal of consternation and reaction, from people you don’t know and from all around the world. Sacco’s experience is extreme, but it shows just what can happen, and the speed with which faux, context-free outrage can circle the globe.
I’m not about to excuse Sacco’s tweet, but I think what’s missing here is a modicum of context and human compassion. How many of us have done something truly, deeply stupid, and wished for nothing more than an opportunity to make things right, a second chance that would allow us to not be defined by our epic f—k-up? It turns out that, even as we hope to be granted that second chance should we mess up, we’re unwilling to grant the same consideration to others. Collectively, we rather enjoy watching and even participating in the virtually instant and very public demise and utter destruction of another. As the article’s author, Jon Ronson, put it: “like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, [they’re] uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.”
The problem is that the cost can be horrific, exacted as it is by people hiding behind the safety of Internet anonymity quite pleased with themselves for doing “the right thing” in taking down someone they feel to be despicable and eminently worthy of destruction. Those participating in the destruction seldom consider the cost of their actions once they hit “ENTER”…and why should they? It’s happening to someone they don’t know and will almost certainly never meet.
That fact doesn’t make a person any less human…no matter what their perceived “crime” may be.
Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.
- Dr. Benjamin Rush, 1787
That cost is the existence of another individual- sometimes it means loss of friends, family, career, and in extreme circumstances life itself. We’re quite happy to participate in the shaming and destruction of another (especially behind the Internet’s wall of anonymity), but we decline to accept responsibility for the cost that participation may exact…because we don’t care.
Hey, as long as it happens to someone else, amiright? Isolation and detachment from the damage done to an actual human being with thoughts and feelings make public shaming an abstract concept. The problem is that this “abstract concept” can have some very dire real-world consequences.
Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”
“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”
Justine Sacco made a joke, one she thought her friends and her 170 Twitter followers would get. What she didn’t take into consideration was what might happen if the joke was to be stripped of context and it reached someone angered enough by it to take her to task for it online? It was an odd, unfortunate mistake for a PR professional to make, but there you have it. She posted the tweet before a flight to South Africa, slept through most of the flight, and landed to find herself suddenly one of the most reviled personalities on the Internet.
The problem begins when one person is in effect fed to the lions. The “mob mentality,” ugly and fearsome enough in real life, can take on a truly horrific role online, where the guarantee of anonymity makes it so much easier to destroy people. I know this to be true, because I’ve engaged in it myself. I’m not proud of that fact, but I can’t change what’s come before. There’s a collective failure to recognize that the person whose destruction is being orchestrated is someone with feelings, someone who wishes for nothing more than a second chance, someone who may in fact not recover from being publicly shamed. Ignominy is a powerful, potentially destructive, burden to bear. Allow that to play out online, and the results are potentially horrific.
In Sacco’s case, she’s made it part of the way back, though she’ll never be the same person she was prior to sending her infamous tweet. One of her chief detractors issued a public online apology to her…after he found himself on Sacco’s side of the fence when he made his own boo-boo. Amazing what a little perspective will do for one’s view of the world, isn’t it? Too bad it took him getting caught up in his own online shaming crisis to understand what giving free reign to righteous indignation online can have significant consequences.
At the [Massachusetts] archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.
Even Jon Ronson, the author, admits to his (sometimes gleeful) role in the online shaming and destruction of those who did or said something that, when stripped of context, was taken to be highly offensive. His research, dating back to Massachusetts’ colonial days, demonstrated that the willingness to inflict suffering on another human being is by no means a recent phenomenon. The power and reach of the Internet has exponentially multiplied the damage that public shaming can do to a person…though few will bother to do even the most cursory due diligence on whether the shaming and personal destruction is warranted.
Turns out we’re a collection of mean-spirited, self-righteous hypocrites prone to shooting first and asking questions later…if those questions even get asked at all.
I highly recommend reading Ronson’s piece. It’s a well-written and researched reflection on our collective penchant for willing, even eagerly, participating in the very public destruction of another human being.
Oh…and you’d best hope that you never find yourself in Justine Sacco’s shoes, because that second chance you’d hope isn’t going to happen. You can’t hope to receive what you’re unwilling to provide others. Compassion and forgiveness is a two-way street, and it’s time those of who spend a good portion of our lives online lost the hypocrisy and recognize our shared and very flawed humanity.
As for me, it would appear I’ve still got some work to do. I want to be a better person and a better citizen of the Wild-West-cum-Salem-Witch trial environment the Internet can be and too often is. Part of it is that after almost 14 years, I’ve contributed to the problem, probably more than I realize. I can’t change the past, but I can try to be a better and more forgiving person going forward.
Perhaps it’s time for each of us to do the same thing…but this is the Internet we’re talking about, which still runs on a steady diet of righteous outrage and cat videos. Good luck changing that, eh?
Then again, every journey begins with a single step, right?
