This terrifying book puts me off going online ever again —except maybe to Ocado — says India Knight

Jeremy Clarkson has been getting it in the neck from Twitter’s (I was going to say) tricoteuses — but social media is both thicko mob and gleeful, literal-minded public executioner. A couple of weeks ago it was George Galloway; and the week before that — oh, I can’t remember. I had a theory about 21st-century shame before I read Jon Ronson’s book — namely that it passes quickly. A Profumo would atone for a lifetime; a Huhne leaves jail to book deals and newspaper columns. The internet fire burns more intensely but turns to ashes faster. Yeesh, was I wrong.

Ronson thinks it all started well. He writes approvingly of the early days of Twitter, when we shamed bad people for good reasons: ‘When the powerful transgressed, we were there,’ he writes, sounding a bit like a cybernat, or like Russell Brand. ‘Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratisation of justice.’ The glorious examples he chooses include the shaming of the Daily Mail, LA Fitness, Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, as well as the journalist Jan Moir, who wrote unpleasantly about the death of the young, gay pop star Stephen Gately. I remember that day: people started posting her home address and saying they were going round to put shit through her letterbox. I don’t know that I found it a beautiful moment.

What a terrifying book this is. It makes you want to delete all social media and never go online again, except maybe to Ocado. Ronson tells the story of public shaming through the stories of individuals. Their transgressions are minuscule — at least I think they are: this book constantly makes you wonder if there is something wrong with your own moral compass.