How Can Our Real Lives Be Ruined By Our Digital Ones?

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So one night - and this is back in May of 2015 - you may remember a big news story here in the U.S.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: All right, breaking news right now, an Amtrak train has crashed in Philadelphia. It is on its side, and several people appear to be injured now.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: We're looking at the scene right now. We don't know much. Train 188 was traveling...

JON RONSON: Yeah, so this train crashed in Philadelphia, and eight people were killed and 200 people were injured. And it was just horrific.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: We know the train managed to jump the track...

RAZ: Like a lot of people that night, writer Jon Ronson was following the story. And just as it was really blowing up on television, and, of course, on the Internet...

RONSON: A woman emerged from the wreckage and tweeted, thanks a lot for derailing my train. Can I please get my violin back from the second car of the train? So Twitter and Facebook responded. Can I read some of the tweets?

RAZ: Yeah.

RONSON: Some spoiled [expletive] is whining about her violin being on that train that derailed. People died on that train, and unfortunately, too many people only think of themselves and not their fellow man. And she's an idiot. I hope the violin is crushed and [expletive] that little [expletive] and her [expletive] violin. I would slap the [expletive] taste out of her mouth if she was in reach. And then she deleted her Twitter account, and someone tweeted, too bad she's a coward and deleted her account. How will her violin ever be returned? And I hope you get your violin back from under the bleeding people. Good luck...

RAZ: The woman's name was published all over the Internet. She was threatened and harassed and had to go into hiding. And this story is becoming a familiar one. Think of the guy who killed that lion in Africa or the woman from Washington state who was posing as black but was actually white. Whatever had happened in the real world to those people, what happened online quickly overtook their lives and became the bigger story, the more relevant one.

RONSON: There were dead people. There were injured people. People were lodged in the luggage racks over people's heads. And this woman emerges dazed from a 102-mile an hour train crash, and that's what she tweeted. Can I please get my violin back from the second car of the train? And a train hit her all over again.

RAZ: Jon Ronson wrote a book about stories like this. It's called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," and it's about what happens when the life we live inside the screen overtakes the life we live outside of it. Today on the show, part-two of Screen Time, ideas about how all the time we spend with our devices, with our screens, is actually changing who we are. And on this episode, we're going to take a step inside the screen to look at just how much of our lives are already being lived there.

Jon Ronson wrote about another woman who lost her job and her friends and, like the woman on that train, had to go into hiding because of something that happened online. And when she described that experience to Jon, she put it this way.

RONSON: She said if I - I sometimes think that if I was in a car crash and I lost my memory and I Googled myself, this would be my new reality.

RAZ: Yeah.

RONSON: Yeah, in the old days, people used to say the Internet is not the real world. I don't think anybody believes that anymore. The Internet is the real world because something that happens to you on the Internet can impact your life in the real world.

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RAZ: The woman who said that was Justine Sacco. Jon Ronson's TED Talk is really the story of Justine and what happened to her. In 2013, she was just another PR rep living in New York. She had just a handful of Twitter followers - 170 to be exact.

RONSON: So it was the Christmas of 2013, and she was traveling from New York to Cape Town where her family left via London. And when she was at Heathrow for the final leg, she tweeted, going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white. And she tweeted that, and nobody responded. Nobody ever responded to her jokes because she had so few followers. So she, you know, shrugged and got on the plane and fell asleep.

RAZ: Jon picks up the story from the TED stage.

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RONSON: Justine Sacco woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway, there was a message from somebody who she hadn't spoken to since high school that said, I am so sorry to see what's happening to you. And then another message from her best friend, you need to call me right now. You are the worldwide No. 1 trending topic on Twitter.

What had happened was that one of her 170 followers had sent the tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers. And then, it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said it felt delicious. And then, he said, but I'm sure she's fine. But she wasn't fine because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece.

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RAZ: I remember being in bed that night, you know, as that first tweet from Justine started to spread.

RONSON: Yes.

RAZ: And I'm ashamed to admit it, but I enjoyed it at the time.

RONSON: Right. I only enjoyed it fleetingly. My first thought was, you know, great, someone's screwed, you know, and I propped the pillow up behind my head. And then I thought I'm not sure that that tweet was intended to be racist - going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white. You know, there is a kind - there's a comedy tradition of people mocking racism by doing an extreme version of it.

RAZ: Yeah.

RONSON: It's why "South Park" is so good. So I became doubtful that actually her tweet was intended to be racist.

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RONSON: In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later at a bar, she was just crushed. And I asked her to explain the joke and she said living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble.

OK, so here were some of the tweets that night. In light of Justine Sacco's disgusting racist tweet, I am donating to CARE today - the charity CARE.

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RONSON: Then came the calls for her to be fired.

How did Justine Sacco get a PR job? Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. AIDS can affect anyone.

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RONSON: Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation. Like the airplane Wi-Fi provider Gogo, they tweeted, next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a Gogo flight, CC - Justine Sacco.

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RONSON: You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20 and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. Somebody else that night wrote, somebody HIV-positive should rape this [expletive] and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS. And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine and our shaming brains are so simpleminded that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. And then Justine's employers got involved.

This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an international flight.

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RONSON: And that's when the anger turned to excitement.

All I want for Christmas is to see Justine Sacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox voice mail.

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RONSON: Can you think of anything less judicial than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity.

A hashtag began trending worldwide.

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RONSON: Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website.

Hashtag #hasJustinelandedyet. It is kind of wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. Hashtag #hasJustinelandedyet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night. Looks like Justine Sacco lands at about...

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RONSON: So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset. But I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we scream them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, this isn't social justice. It's a cathartic alternative.

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RAZ: The thing about the story is that's who she became to most people.

RONSON: Yes, exactly. The way we are defined on social media, on the Internet, on Google, has become more important than who we actually are as people because everybody you date is going to Google you. Every time you apply for a job people are going to Google you. So these false definitions, these scant parts of your life, these tiny moments, the most extreme thing you did, as opposed to the 25 billion ordinary things that you did, have now become more important ways of defining you than who you actually are.

RAZ: Which, in some ways, is almost limiting, like, what we'll be able to say or how we're going to live.

RONSON: Yeah. It's - so everybody becomes more conservative and conforms. You know, this is another irony of social media is that on social media we see ourselves as nonconformist. And yet, all of this surveillancing of other people is inevitably creating a more conservative and conformist society because whatever we - you know, we define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside.

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RONSON: Justine Sacco was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. But the phrase misuse of privilege is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. And it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions. Maybe there's two types of people in the world - those people who favor humans over ideology and those people who favor ideology over humans. But right now, the ideologues are winning and they're creating a stage for constant, artificial high-dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or the sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid. What's true is that we're gray areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. But we're now creating a surveillance society where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. Let's not do that. Thank you.

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RAZ: You can see Jon Ronson's full talk at Ted.com. By the way, Justine Sacco recently started a new job in New York. She keeps a pretty low profile and she is definitely not on Twitter anymore. Coming up, as we continue our look at Screen Time, a place where people on the Internet become better - not worse - than they are in real life. That place actually exists. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.