Social Media In Arthur Miller's The Crucible

Monica Lewinsky-this name may bring thoughts of disgust to many. Her affair with the president of the United States (Bill Clinton) was spread around the Internet like rapid fire. Lewinsky was humiliated to no end by having audio messages shared without her consent and having people write nasty things which destroyed her image. She was disgraced because her actions did not correlate with the majority 's beliefs. People bashed on her because that 's what humans tend to do: point out others faults so that they don 't have to deal with their own. This is exemplified in The Crucible by Arthur Miller. When addressing the Salem witch trials, Miller goes in depth describing the people of Massachusetts as filled with mass hysteria, superstition, …show more content…
Now it has reached a new platform: social media. One example is of a woman named Justine Sacco. As she was going on a family trip to Africa, she sent out a tweet that many people took offence too: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” This wasn 't anything new for Sacco, who frequently tweeted about the indignities of travel. But as soon as she got off of her flight, she started getting hundreds of notifications which were filled with nasty comments about what a terrible, racist person she was. She didn 't think that someone would actually take her tweet literally; she was merely commenting on white privilege and how white people usually think that nothing can happen to them. It was suppose to be a joke. This all escalated to Sacco getting fired from her high paying PR job at IAC. Even though she accepted being fired from her job, she did not find the punishment for her “crime” right when she found that people had been following her around to taking her picture and make nasty blog posts about her. This could also be seen in a case from 1742 with a woman named Abigail Gilpin. While her husband was away at see, she was found naked with another man. As punishment, they were sentenced to 20 whips on a pole in front of the town. Abigail also accepted her punishment for the sin she committed but begged that she could be whipped at an hour before the people awoke. She didn 't want to be publically shamed; the embarrassment being far worse than the whipping. Even though both women accepted, regretted, and apologised for what they had done, people still felt like they had to right to get in the victim 's inherent evil and make them suffer for it while judging their whole life based on one event in their life. It’s not only wrong, it 's