Justine Sacco's case

            I completely agree with Massaro that shame would be an ineffective punishment tool, and I think that the Justine Sacco case demonstrates the problem pretty well considering that the audience of the internet shares a key similarity with the US and urban settings: its huge audience.

            First, Massaro’s insight that determining the severity of a shame sanction would be difficult because of the spread by word of mouth to other people (788) is seen quite plainly in the Sacco case.  Word of mouth blew the “shame sanction” others imposed way out of proportion despite the original person who shamed Sacco most likely not wanting the entire Twittersphere to shame her.  In other words, there was no difference between the severity of showing Sacco’s tweet to a few others and the severity of announcing her tweet on national TV.  Furthermore, the intensity of the ensuing shame also confirms Massaro’s point concerning the cruelty of shaming – the great psychological damage that Sacco received from the consequences of the shame sanction is obvious.

            One may still conclude just from this that shaming may be cruel, but effective as a deterrent because of its cruelty.  However, this is also false.  In large audiences like the US or the Internet, people simply do not have the energy to pay attention to enough cases to make shaming a deterrent; people do not expect large-scale shamings when they write a tweet because it simply does not happen enough.  Rather, small “curiosities” that are “particularly grotesque, bizarre, or flamboyant” (785) become viral while most cases go unnoticed.  So Sacco’s case not only reflects the crest of the wave of shame in these large audiences, but also the existence of the large troughs of the wave where the audience simply does not care to shame the perpetrators.  The fact that the Sacco case soon faded from the spotlight also reflects the short-lived attention span of large audiences.

            These short and intense raids of shame seen on the Internet are quite superficial as well.  Not only was it obvious that people had neglected to take into consideration the nuances of the Sacco case before shaming her, but there is also no semblance of an attempt to restore Sacco’s dignity or even any real analysis of the issues at hand.  People simply shamed as a performance to others, shamed without fully understanding what happened, and shamed without really explaining how Sacco had violated some moral rule.  What ultimately resulted was not only a short and intense raid, but a raid that was committed blindly without real care for either the moral issues or for the rehabilitation and restoration of the perpetrator.

            Ultimately, I feel that shaming sanctions imposed by the government will result mostly in apathy punctuated by short-lived, intense, blindly-led raids of shame that would fail to accomplish anything beyond causing psychological damage without any real grappling of the moral wrong that the perpetrator committed.