In Ronson’s article “God That Was Awesome,” readers are made to look into the impact of social media on our lives through exploration of Justine Sacco’s ‘fall from fame’. Living in the 2000s, with the boom of handheld technologies and the internet, social media has undeniably taken over our lives; we are constantly surrounded by tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Snapchats, and alike. With our modern day technologies, we are constantly plugged into the rapid fire stream of news and media our social media accounts deliver straight to our palms. At what point does this become dangerous? We hear of cyberbullying nearly every day; public shaming through the media platforms we as a society spend most of our waking hours browsing through. People cursing, insulting, picking on each other thousands of miles apart from each other, each from the comforts of their own lives behind their screens. Ronson journalizes a classic example of social media and the mob mentality of hate through the catastrophic conclusions of an unfortunate tweet by Justine Sacco in December of 2013.
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” (Ronson 68) was what her infamous tweet read. Little did Justine Sacco know this tweet would be the end of her life as she knew it. The reality of her life after touching down from her eleven hour flight was very different than she had left it. She had millions of people waiting for her landing, and not for amicable reasons. Millions of people waiting to throw some more hate to Sacco for a bad joke of a tweet. The true question comes with Ronson’s point: that “it seemed obvious that her tweet, whilst not a great joke, wasn’t racist, but a reflexive comment on white privilege.” (Ronson 68) Did a bad joke warrant a global shaming on Twitter and the upset of a woman’s whole life? Her tweet, an obvious joke, was met with an overwhelmingly severe reaction. Ronson links it to “her shamers [having been] gripped by some kind of group madness or something” (Ronson 68), very much like a mob mentality.
Ronson takes things a step further in addressing this mob mentality of hatred on social media, especially in Justine Sacco’s case, by consulting with Ted Poe: a professional judge with a “national trademark … to publically shame defendants” (Ronson 82). In an interview, Ronson said to Poe “”Social media shamings are worse than your shamings.”” (Ronson 88). To which Poe replied: “”They are worse. … They’re anonymous.”” (Ronson 88). “You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. They’re worldwide forever.” (Rosnon 90). We get so swept up in the inane need to do ‘right’ and to fit in, and social media feeds our society’s need for unsolicited and underqualified judgement.
Works Cited
Ronson, Jon. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Riverhead Books, 2016.