Questions:
- What does the presenter imply by saying that Twitter was “a place of radical de-shaming”?
- What happened when Jonah, a disgraced pop science writer, was trying to apologize? Why did people call him a psychopath?
- What did Justine’s joke imply? Why did it provoke a burst of aggression?
- What is the message the presenter is getting across?
- Have you ever shamed people for whatever reasons and regretted your words later?
- Do you feel that it’s much easier to condemn people through the Internet rather than to their face?
- How do you understand this phrase: “Maybe there’re two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans”.
- There is a comment on the talk that says: “The IQ of a crowd is equal to the IQ of its least-intelligent member divided by the number of individuals in the crowd”. To what extent do you agree?
Vocabulary
eloquent = able to use language and express your opinions well, especially when you are speaking in public
Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent.
to level out = to cause something to assume a more level course or path.
Hierarchies were being leveled out.
salvation = state of being saved from the power of evil/a way of protecting somebody from danger, disaster, loss, etc
Maybe it would win him some salvation.
acerbic = /əˈsɜːbɪk/ (of a person or what they say) critical in a direct and rather cruel way
She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she’d Tweet little acerbic jokes to them.
leg = one part of a journey or race
And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg.
to dismantle = take apart a machine or structure so that it is in separate pieces
But she wasn’t fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece.
gleeful = happy because of something good you have done or something bad that has happened to somebody else
to flaunt = show something you are proud of to other people, in order to impress them
Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege.
annihilation = complete destruction of somebody/something
And one Internet economist told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine’s annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming — we got nothing.
to misconstrue = (formal) to understand somebody’s words or actions wrongly
And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you’ve just been torn to shreds because of a misconstrued liberal joke.
cathartic = involving the release of strong feelings as a way of providing relief from anger, suffering, etc.
This isn’t social justice. It’s a cathartic alternative.
to get mangled = crush or twist something so that it is badly damaged
The people I met were mangled. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety…