Shamed by the Internet
Do you ever do something as a joke that you think is funny, but someone else takes it seriously? Have you ever done something so bad and you didn’t even know it? Sometimes things that we feel are funny and innocent, the internet shames us for, resulting in long lasting effects. One case study of this is Lindsey Stone. What she saw as a visual pun, many saw as offensive and she was publicly shamed for it.
Lindsey Stone made a joke that not everyone thought was funny. She was a charity worker who worked with the mentally disabled. She and a friend had a long-running joke in which they would stand next to signs doing the opposite of what they said. Dustin Rowles, author of What Happened to Lindsey Stone, commented on an interview of …show more content…
It wasn’t until Jon Ronson suggested that she try a service that would hide the picture on the internet. That may seem like weird statement, but that’s what they do at Reputation.com. Farukh Rashid was put in charge of making Stone disappear. His plan was to add more things about Stone all over the internet so that when you searched her name, you wouldn’t just see the picture that ruined her life. Farukh’s plan was to:
…..overwhelm that terrible photograph, wash it away in a tidal wave of positivity, away to a place on Google where normal people don’t look--a place like page two of the search results. According to Google’s own research into our ‘eye movements,’ 53 percent of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89 percent don’t look down past the first page. (Ronson 264-265)
He hid the picture in plain sight. If you search the name Lindsey Stone on google today, you will find the picture, but you will also find other pictures of her doing normal stuff and pictures of other Lindsey Stones’. Farukh said, “We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland”(Ronson 266). The plan worked. It even surprised Stone. Ronson
Do you ever do something as a joke that you think is funny, but someone else takes it seriously? Have you ever done something so bad and you didn’t even know it? Sometimes things that we feel are funny and innocent, the internet shames us for, resulting in long lasting effects. One case study of this is Lindsey Stone. What she saw as a visual pun, many saw as offensive and she was publicly shamed for it.
Lindsey Stone made a joke that not everyone thought was funny. She was a charity worker who worked with the mentally disabled. She and a friend had a long-running joke in which they would stand next to signs doing the opposite of what they said. Dustin Rowles, author of What Happened to Lindsey Stone, commented on an interview of …show more content…
It wasn’t until Jon Ronson suggested that she try a service that would hide the picture on the internet. That may seem like weird statement, but that’s what they do at Reputation.com. Farukh Rashid was put in charge of making Stone disappear. His plan was to add more things about Stone all over the internet so that when you searched her name, you wouldn’t just see the picture that ruined her life. Farukh’s plan was to:
…..overwhelm that terrible photograph, wash it away in a tidal wave of positivity, away to a place on Google where normal people don’t look--a place like page two of the search results. According to Google’s own research into our ‘eye movements,’ 53 percent of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89 percent don’t look down past the first page. (Ronson 264-265)
He hid the picture in plain sight. If you search the name Lindsey Stone on google today, you will find the picture, but you will also find other pictures of her doing normal stuff and pictures of other Lindsey Stones’. Farukh said, “We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland”(Ronson 266). The plan worked. It even surprised Stone. Ronson