While Cersei Lannister’s public shaming on last night's "Game of Thrones" -- in which the Queen Mother was verbally and physically abused while paraded naked through the streets -- was very medieval, it also had some modern overtones.
Jon Ronson, who wrote a book about public shaming called “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” wrote a brief piece for Vanity Fair about Cersei’s walk of shame, comparing the spectacle to contemporary acts of public shaming.
In particular, Ronson compared the High Sparrow to Ted Poe, a congressman and former Texan judge whose trademark was "to punish defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up. “ However, in Ronson’s view, Cersei’s shaming is "much more like a social-media shaming.”
As Ronson put it, "When Justine Sacco was torn apart on Twitter for a badly worded joke intended to mock white privilege—‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white’—she was brutally jeered by hundreds of thousands. She was bombarded with rape threats and death threats and was fired from her job. Almost nobody told Sacco, 'Things will be okay.' Those that tried were themselves accused by furious people of being privileged."
"In real life we are lovely," Ronson concludes. "On social media we are like a horrific mob from Game of Thrones. I told Judge Poe this when I met him. 'On social media we are more frightening than you.'”
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