After Reading Jonson’s chapter, “God That Was Awesome,” my group and I decided to revolve our research around whether or not public shaming should be regulated on Social Media. Throughout the chapter, we were given insight on how rapidly social media can escalate situations from an ignorant post, to the destruction of an individual’s reputation. To illustrate, Justine Sacco, a Journalist, make a twitter post commenting on AIDS. Her intentions were to be humorous; however, the response she received did not reflect her motive. As a result, she was lost her career and she was forced to live with the burden of being another victim of public shaming. Based on the examples of public shaming found in the chapter, we began to contemplate on if it is possible to prevent instances like this from occurring by implementing regulations. Because of this, we found two scholarly sources that provide solutions for this question with an argument and concrete evidence.
The first source is a journal entry by Kristine Gallardo called “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob.” Within this reading, the author elaborates how social media has evolved to become this “explosive” (Gallardo) platform that has changed the nature of shaming. Since social media is so accessible, posts and comments pile up quickly, especially if there are several people who feel strongly about the same issue. Most of this time, the owner of the post is targeted instead on meaning of what he or she said. Due to this, that person is ruined by complete strangers. This source emphasizes the fact that because Instances like this have occurred so frequently, the issue becomes a dichotomy between taking legal steps to control everyone or teaching people to be more cautious about what they put online.
Going along this idea, second source, “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy,” by Emily Laidlaw includes a variety of information regarding online platforms and whether people are guaranteed to have freedom while using them. Although this source has several aspects that relate to our research, one thing that stands out is how the author distinguishes between “rightfully knocking someone” (Laidlaw) and humiliation. Rightfully knocking someone basically justifies public shaming on the grounds of punishing someone due to their negative actions. Conversely, humiliation deals with wrongfully attacking someone online when he or she did not deserve it. In relation to our argument, it is important we determine what defines public shaming before focusing on regulations.
Works Cited
Kristine Gallardo. “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Tech. L, vol. 19, 2017, 721-746.
Laidlaw, Emily. “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy.” Faculty of Law, University of Calgary, 2017.
Ronson, Jon. “So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” Riverhead Books, 2015.
For part one of making a summary you did not include the author names in the actual summary, though you did have them in the citations. The second part, the question you did answer that as yes everything you were taking about revolved around public shaming. I’m not really sure if you answered that question or not though. You did at least dive into a why/how well. Giving the main ideas of each essay does lead to the answer but you need to make what that answer more obvious if you believe that you had it in there.