Cancel Culture: A New Form Of Public Shaming And Humiliation
These days, we “cancel” people instead of throwing tomatoes at them.
Is today’s cancel culture much different to the Roman Crucifixions or the locking of individuals in stocks, open to verbal and physical abuse in colonial America?
What is Cancel Culture? The word has been thrown around ceaselessly to the point where it risks losing its meaning, but overall it is a social media term that refers to the mass disapproval of a certain person’s or company’s actions, consequently urging everyone to boycott all things that they promote or are involved in.
One might be cancelled for several reasons, and in some cases, like sexual harassment, it is definitely justified.
However, many celebrities and influencers get cancelled for reasons out of their control, such as for having used a derogatory word 15 years ago, back when those same words weren’t considered disrespectful or derogatory. In such cases, cancelling is useless and counterproductive.
Humanity loves to create ideologies that we expect everyone to follow.
Sometimes, these moral ideologies blind people, and we end up favouring the ideologies over the person, who might be a genuinely good and kind-hearted person with good intentions.
Is it fair to hold influencers and celebrities to high standards, when we all make these same mistakes? No one is perfect, right?
Jon Ronson writes in his book ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed’ –
“I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they’re creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all – even though we know that’s not how we should define our fellow humans. What’s true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas….”
“The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let’s not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”
Public humiliation has become part of human nature.
Social Media gives us a platform to shame others with less guilt on our hands because Instagram and Twitter do not feel like they are part of the real and tangible world.
The consequences of cancelling someone can affect that person both emotionally and financially, and although we are not physically harming them (unlike the more traditional public shaming), the intentions behind the shaming are similar.
Jon Ronson discusses how individuals consider themselves kind, yet tend to destroy someone and their reputation.
We de-humanise those who are cancelled to rationalize our behaviour towards them, therefore the shaming is good. We also get validation from the thousands of others doing the shaming.
Is it in our instinct to shame and humiliate, or do we get caught up in the mass? Does shaming others make us feel better about ourselves?
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