"Last night I was in Belfast and I was making jokes about Ian Paisley and everybody was laughing. There’s always a sense of unease when you're doing something like that; here we are laughing at this person who's not in the room. I've always thought there's something a bit to cosy about that. And I really love the fact there's nothing cosy about this new book. In it I'm saying, 'Look at what we're doing, we're acting like monsters. We've become the crazy people'."
Jon Ronson is seated in Dublin's Merrion Hotel discussing his latest book So You've Been Publicly Shamed with Hot Press. In it he explores the process of social media shaming and its impact, through a variety of case studies, including Jonah Lehrer, the writer who fabricated Bob Dylan quotes, and Justine Sacco, the New York PR woman who sent an ill-judged AIDS tweet en route to South Africa.
Jonson's thought-provking tome is an engrossing and alarming read, which will certainly make you think twice about the possible repercussions of that next mouse click.
The outing has its roots in a spambot – Ronson's identity was hijacked by a group of academics who posed as the author on Twitter. This prompted him to explore the ramifications of how we perceive ourselves and others on social media.
"Everybody in my book has had their identity stolen," asserts Ronson. "Everyone's getting defined by some poorly worded message. It is stupidly assumed that some badly phrased tweet is a clue to that person's inherent evil."
Perhaps the best example of this is Justine Sacco, who tweeted what she thought was a humorous swipe at the West's perception of the developing world, en route to Cape Town: 'Going to Africa. Home I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white!' The kneejerk reaction on social media resulted in Sacco being fired and cast as a social pariah.
"There's been what they call huge pushback in America against this book," says Ronson. "Why has Jon Ronson chosen Justine Sacco? Why is he being sympathetic towards this unsympathetic person? That all makes me dig me heels in more, because I feel I've prodded a hornet's nest that needed to be prodded."
An avid tweeter, Ronson has modified his social media behaviour considerably of late.
"Well, I certainly don't disproportionately punish people anymore," he states. "Every day Ricky Gervais will set is 20 million followers onto this person or that person. I find it harder to see human beings as one-dimensional now. In some ways that's a really positive quality and in other ways it's not. It means you become slightly less critical. But it also means you become more compassionate. I've found there are people that favour ideology over humans and people who favour humans over ideology."
His crusade to examine our cyber comportment has – apparently inadvertently – turned out to be what some professionals deem a self-help title.