While reading this, one form of humiliation that is utilized today, despite no conviction being made, are mugshots posted in newspapers, online, and specifically on social media. I remember being...
While reading this, one form of humiliation that is utilized today, despite no conviction being made, are mugshots posted in newspapers, online, and specifically on social media. I remember being in high school and my dad coming home to tell me that his mugshot would be in the local newspaper the next day. He had been working at a powerplant and the company partnered with police to lock the plant down and arrest anyone who refused to take a drug test. Of course, the charges were thrown out but his name/face was still in the newspaper as a means to shame him.
Even if formal institutions can, in the long run, be compelled to respect their members’ dignity, unfortunately it has been a feature of public life over recent decades that individuals and social groups enjoy a greater freedom to behave ‘indecently’ and inflict harm on each other. People often use this freedom to humiliate ‘horizontally’. Such humiliation is often no longer about shaming someone into a socially acceptable conduct. Instead, it’s about degrading others for what they are: too smart or too dumb, too fat or too skinny, too white or too black, too feminine or too masculine. Religious and ethnic backgrounds as well as sexual orientations have served as popular targets of humiliation.
In recent years, social media has greatly expanded the opportunities for, and the effects of this kind of humiliation. The internet puts no constraints on how widely a humiliating video, image or text can be circulated. It also invites more and more people to actively participate in the humiliation game and thus gain ‘followers’.
This makes me think of all the spaces on the internet that I have interacted with, where the whole intent of the community is to post pics and videos of people to degrade, shame, and humiliate them. Some are more filled with malice but even those that are not so hateful has felt gross to me. Especially over the past 10 or so years where the internet has grown louder, larger, and more obnoxious.
While reading this, one form of humiliation that is utilized today, despite no conviction being made, are mugshots posted in newspapers, online, and specifically on social media. I remember being in high school and my dad coming home to tell me that his mugshot would be in the local newspaper the next day. He had been working at a powerplant and the company partnered with police to lock the plant down and arrest anyone who refused to take a drug test. Of course, the charges were thrown out but his name/face was still in the newspaper as a means to shame him.
This makes me think of all the spaces on the internet that I have interacted with, where the whole intent of the community is to post pics and videos of people to degrade, shame, and humiliate them. Some are more filled with malice but even those that are not so hateful has felt gross to me. Especially over the past 10 or so years where the internet has grown louder, larger, and more obnoxious.