Most people should be familiar with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter." You know, the book about the unwed woman who gets pregnant and has to wear the red A on her clothing for the rest of her life, so her whole town can shame her? If you weren’t assigned to read it in high school, you must have at least seen "Easy A," the Emma Stone movie loosely based on that book.
Well, while we don’t go around today holding public trials in the neighborhood exposing our neighbors’ dirty laundry for everyone to see, we have found another way to not-so-subtly do this — taking videos of people doing “bad” things and putting it on the Internet.
But the Internet isn’t just for local townsfolk to witness this humiliation — the whole world finds out.
And now I’m asking you to do this — start shaming this type of public shaming.
When someone deviates outside of the societal norm or breaks a minor law — say, driving in the carpool lane alone — someone somewhere will inevitably video tape it, and show it to the whole world; family, friends, coworkers, and bosses will watch this person doing something “wrong.”
When this happens we are able to feel good about our own moral superiority while condemning a complete stranger’s behavior. Is this something that is good for our society? Do we need to punish these people, whom we don’t even know?
"Well, if someone is doing something wrong, they deserve to be punished," someone might argue. And in cases where people are breaking the law that’s true — and you should leave the law to punish them instead of assisting with that. But what about people being publicly punished not for breaking the law, but for some other flaw of theirs?
In 2015, a teenager committed suicide after a video was posted to Facebook of her dad punishing her for an Instagram post. This private punishment quickly turned into a public shaming.
Turns out there’s a price to this very public humiliation.
People have lost jobs over this. People have lost friends over this. It’s quick and easy to form a mob over the Internet while you can remain anonymous behind a screen. This vigilante justice of public shaming is a very gray area — hence, why some people love shaming videos, claiming these people deserve it, and why others aren’t very comfortable with them.
The next time you’re laughing at the video of that dad shooting his daughter’s laptop with his gun and publicly condemning her for being a spoiled teenager put yourself in her shoes. Would you want to go out and face the world after everyone you know has seen it? Is this the kind of parent you want to be? Maybe he should’ve punished his bratty kid in private like most 21st-century families do…but that’s his call, not mine.
