The shame spiral: how social media retweets humanity’s dark side
Social media can connect, amuse, and empower. It can also turn private human frailty into mindless entertainment, abuse, trial by mob, and worse. Can we change how we use it – or is it too late to #BeKind?
In his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, the journalist Jon Ronson makes a salient point about the cut-and-thrust of life online. In social media, he writes, “We’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.”
The TV presenter Caroline Flack was often subjected to the highs ...
