Samad 2.0

In December 2013, waiting for landing on a flight to Cape Town to anyone unknown PR manager of the American digital publishing house IAC, Justin Sakko sent a tweet: “I'm going to Africa. I hope not to catch AIDS. Kidding. I'm white! " In principle, for its 170 followers, replicas playing stereotypes on the verge of a foul were familiar, but do not underestimate the power of one retweet. Upon arrival in Cape Town, Juustin was already in Twitter's trends. Needless to say, what kind of Reaplai prevailed in her tape: “The level of her racist ignorance is worthy of Fox News . #AIDS can touch everyone! " Or “And now we will see how this bitch @justinesco will be fired. In real time ", etc. After a couple of weeks, Twit and actually cost her work and his whole familiar life.

It is the stories of this kind that consists of the book of British journalist John Ronson “So You've Been Publicly Shamed” (“So, you have been publicly frozen”), in which he is trying to trace the rapid growth of the popularity of public online shocking, understand its roots and describe what dangers he is fraught with. The list of Ronson’s heroes is great: from ordinary people like Justin Sakko to celebrities like journalist John Lerer, who came in fictional quotes from Bob Dylan, and T -shirt of Daisy, who made the noise of the agony and ecstasy of Steve Jobs about Chinese workers Apple , which turned out to be for the most part invented, although it was presented as a documentary. One thing is related to all these people: at some point, the aspects of their life surfaced in the public space, which caused rejection and instant, avalanche-like condemnation-and not from church or state authorities, but on behalf of a many-sided, but at the same time uniform, spreading through social networks of the crowd.

Ronson does not bypass the examples of Shaying from the “old” media: the history of Max Mosley, the former head of the International Automobile Federation and the son of the chief British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, whose BDSM-photo were replicated by tabloids, is devoted to this. In general, the practices of public humiliation “in real life”, like flogging and shameful pillars, went out of fashion back in the middle of the 19th century, but, as Ronson shows, with the spread of social Internet, public humiliation is revived as a kind of “gravity 2.0”. This kind in form has nothing to do with the frightening paintings of an angry crowd, a lying criminal; Violence is symbolic in nature and aims to destroy reputation and dignity. The main weapon is shame as feeling, the irresistible power of which leads the offender beyond the brackets of society - often not virtually, but quite real. For example, in the case of Justine Sakko, this is not only loss of work, but also the inability to find a new or lead a full -fledged social life without constant references to a stupid joke, which went beyond the generally accepted rules in the liberal media. As Ronson writes in the final of his book, "we determine the boundaries of normality, tearing into parts of those who are outside of them."

The main object of rather moderate, by the way, Ronson’s critics were precisely the norms of behavior that find fertile ground in the architecture and political economy of social networks. In the process of this analysis, Ronsson refers to the ancestor of the psychology of the crowd of Gustav Le Bon and the Stanford experiment, as well as to reputation management, which is often involved in the creation of sites and posts that would lead out reports about shameful events in the life of customers to the third page in the issuance of Google . Along the way, Ronson makes several observations that all together look like symptoms of a more serious problem than Shaming itself. So, on the example of most heroes, it can be seen that the very possibility of apology is actually absent for them: the logic of online shiming is not aimed at atonement, but rather, to root a sense of shame. In many ways, this is the result of the fact that only the real time of communication matters on the network. It is important the maximum saturation with the messages and images of the information space that was formed around a certain information farm - Twita Justine Sakko or the fakes of John Lerer. In such conditions, the issue of forgiveness and atonement in a sense cannot be posed-there is simply no time for this, since the new information farmer has already managed to loosen on the horizon. As Ronson is trying to demonstrate, such an ecstasy of communication is, in principle, there is bread of companies like Google and Facebook , which needs even more users and even more data about their behavior to sell advertising. In such a situation, every curse addressed to the same Lerer is a potential profit for the platform.

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After one technological conference in California, an unremarkable ITSHAN named Hank was in the center of the network storm: his sebaceous joke did not like Adrie Richards sitting in front, who photographed Hank and uploaded his photo with a comment on Twitter, adding a post on her blog the next day. The post was late-Hank had already been fired by that time because of the hype began. But the Internet is a refuge of many social groups and different values, so there was nothing surprising in the fact that the author of Twith ADRIA RICHARDS was also in the near future -because of the DDOS , on the site of its employer from trolls with 4Chan (one of the most famous English -language image -based image -based image -based insults, sexist insults , sexy insults, sexy insults. threats of rape and bloody photoshop. Sheiming in this situation turned out to be double-sided: both liberal-modular and aggressive-secretary from the inhabitants of 4Chan .

At the same time, according to the philosopher Oksana Timofeev, “the structure of Shaying mainly remains archaic: supporters and opponents are in public space on different sides of the barricades, as if we are talking about a discussion on a bench at the entrance.” The value systems involved in Sheiming, including his sexist subspecies of Slutsiming, whose victim was Adria Richards, in general, also remain old, and the network in this situation is nothing more than an effective conductor of often polar public emotions. According to Timofeeva, Sheiming “has a very strong ritual component: virtual groups gather and publicly expel scapegoats from the public sphere. Around this sacred figure, the group is solidarized, violence in it circulates from one member to another. On the network there is a spontaneous and unconscious re -wearing of rituals, one way or another associated with archaic practices. ”

As the network researchers emphasize such as Mark Andrievich and Alice Marvik, paranoid state surveillance of users - like the one that Snowden spoke about - gained her twinel in the form of routine surveillance of users one after another. Instead of a panopticum, an omniopticum arises when everyone is monitoring everyone and thus groping the boundaries of standards. Most users are much less worried about what the government can find out about them, than what friends and friends of friends can find out about them. This leads to a kind of self -censorship, conformity and normalization, and any departure from this order becomes an object of intensive emotional reaction of users who can physically exist on different continents: Justine Sakko was greeted by African users, armed with smartphones.

In online shiming, another feature is very significant, about which in his book “Networks Without a Cuse” writes the Dutch media theoretic Gert Lovink. He notices that the culture of the reflated in principle is not aimed at the dialogue - only the fact of pressing the “Send” button is important in it. Otherwise, Adria Richards would simply turn to Hank and expressed everything in his face, instead of draining his photo on Twitter. And the click on the “Send” button is, first of all, an affective act. When the mass of users removed from each other is broken into a violator of norms accepted in a particular community, the co -author of the Lovinka, the philosopher Jodie Dean calls “affective communities”, in which a sense of unity due to an instant emotional reaction to the info -growing arises as quickly as it disappears.

Okay, but what to do with it, how to deal with the victims of "Samad 2.0"? In his book, Ronson gives an example of the same Max Mosley, who simply put the tabloids. But Mosley is a representative of a privileged, financially secured class, and to ordinary people who unsuccessfully joked on Twitter, such legal options are not always available. The only way out, it seems, is the affirmative gesture of the person himself, to which others can join, forming a new “affective community”, which opposes the dogmas of the general public. Oksana Timofeeva in such a vein discusses the flash mob #I will say: “The victims of violence are silent just because of shame. The flash mob becomes such an affirmative or even negative gesture - a person enters into a public space and actively denies the existing order, all this is a swamp of sending or just shaming. The man says: I can’t drown in him, because I am not ashamed. ”