ABSTRACT
While the damages of online shaming have been well iterated, here I want to focus on the dependence of shame on social norms, which themselves may be open or hidden, repressive or liberatory. My most basic argument is that shame is a moral symptom rather than a cause, and that our focus should be on the norms that are hidden or overt in its enacting. That is, because shame functions, depending on the community using it, either as a way of reinforcing social norms or critiquing them, its effects, particularly when it occurs online, are highly variant and unpredictable. This makes it an exceptionally unwieldy tool, but I would contend, not something to be condemned in the abstract. Online shaming is very much a double-edged sword with respect to its ethics: the very characteristics of online life – anonymity, immediacy, democracy – that create communities of solidarity for folks who are marginalized, can also be employed in service of repressive norms, by folks who have a surfeit of social and political capital. Because the sociality of norms is invisible for those in dominant social positions (as in, normative beliefs do not seem normative to folks in socially dominant positions – they seem simply like descriptions of reality), this renders shame all the more valuable as a tool of critique for those on the margins at the very same time as it is an unwieldy and damaging weapon for those in dominant social positions.
