Contextual Analysis
While Jon Ronson’s So
You’ve Been Publicly Shamed discusses the role played by shame and
shaming across contemporary society generally, it is in large part focused on
internet firestorms where thousands or hundreds of thousands of strangers
anonymously ridicule and abuse supposed miscreants. In some cases, the victims
are famous people who have committed some sort of transgression – for instance,
the author Jonah Lehrer, who was disgraced after it was revealed that he had
made up quotations from Bob Dylan. But non-celebrities can also be swept
up in the whirlwind. The examples Ronson discusses by and large centre on jokes
which were either misunderstood or interpreted in the most damning way
possible. Ronson’s key example is Justine Sacco, who was cyber-lynched for the
following tweet in December 2013:
In each of the firestorms Ronson describes, the joke which
sparked the rumpus was taken out of context.[i]
This is an obvious diagnosis of why people became so furiously indignant at
Sacco’s tweet, and exulted in her demise. But it also suggests certain features
about context, and how the internet changes in the context in which humour is
produced and, more importantly, received.
Perhaps the most obvious aspect of context is the audience’s
personal knowledge of the person telling the joke. If we are acquainted with
them, or are with them when they crack wise, we know that they are joking and
we will usually have a pretty good idea of the spirit in which their remark is
intended. One of the frequently-remarked aspects of internet communication is
the degree to which subtleties of tone are lost, so what is intended as ironic
(Sacco’s tweet) comes across (to her persecutors) as gleefully mocking those
less fortunate than her. This isn’t primarily a matter of anonymity (although
this is certainly relevant, particularly when considering the often-hateful
nature of much of what passes for internet commentary) – it is primarily a
matter of not personally knowing the person telling the joke, rather than not
knowing who they are. People who knew Sacco would presumably have known she was
joking, even if they might have disapproved. They wouldn’t have taken her to be
expressing a racist view, just trying to make a shocking joke.
A second aspect of context is a shared experience or common
background knowledge. A huge number of jokes, from cliches about airplane food
to political satire, depend on the joke teller and their audience having enough
in common to be able to pick up on certain cues and make certain judgements
without having to think too hard. This is one of the reasons why so much comedy
is relatively parochial – it relies on quite specific references and
assumptions, and transplanted to another culture or society, it ceases to
function as comedy. Of course, the internet is particularly well suited to
bring about such cultural transplantation. But I don’t think this is what
happened in the case of Sacco, or the other cases Ronson mentions – or at any
rate, what happened is not as simple as a piece of parochial comedy failing to
travel well abroad.
What happened here concerned background knowledge of a quite
specific kind: it included the understanding that conventions for joking exist,
and that people who are making jokes should not be held to other standards
(similarly, understanding what people say often requires knowing that they have
said something metaphorical, and that what they have said should not – indeed,
must not – be understood literally). At least some of the responses to Sacco’s
tweet which Ronson quotes (e.g., ‘Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox
News. #AIDS can affect anyone!’) seem to have overlooked or deliberately
ignored the fact that she was making a joke.[ii]
A related convention is that certain people, in certain circumstances, are
licenced to say things which would otherwise offend. Sacco acknowledged that
part of the problem was that she was not perceived as benefiting from this convention: “Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park, or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the
epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform”.
The conventions governing when someone is joking, and when
it is appropriate to joke, have not disappeared with the coming of the internet
– arguably, they have not changed at all. What has changed is the degree of
complicity or shared knowledge between a person tweeting a joke and the
potential audience of strangers, who may neither share this knowledge nor be
terribly interested in its relevance. Not only do people online not know you –
worse still, they might not even know whether or not you are joking.
[i] As
Ronson put it concerning another case, a photo taken by a woman as part of a
running joke of pictures disobeying signs, “shorn of this context, her picture
appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead”.
[ii]
Without knowing more about the respondents in question, it’s impossible to be
sure. But the response quoted in the main text certainly seems to be accusing
her, not of making a tasteless joke, but of making a non-jocular statement
predicated on a factual inaccuracy. Put another way: if one felt that Sacco was
making a tasteless joke, it would seem peculiar to respond by pointing out that
white people can also be victims of AIDS.
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