Thursday, March 10, 2016

A Message About Shame


     This is not a work of fiction.

     This is not simply a book about shame.

     This is a book about us.

     About us and our ability to ruin lives as easily a few keystrokes and a click.

     So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson is a non-fictional book beginning with Ronson discovering how influential online shaming via a incident with a Twitter spambot. As a result of this incident, Ronson goes on to investigate notable incidents where public shaming played a huge role, interviewing people involved in various shame fests such as a writer caught fabricating a quote, a normal person who made one bad tweet, a 4Chan user.

     So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a dialogue on how we use social media today and how we use shame to tear others down and how we're influenced by others and how we use shame to make ourselves feel better.

     And though Ronson's book is dark, there are messages that needed to be said within the book. Shame can be a powerful tool against oppressors. Yet, oppressors have an equally powerful tool, it is Shame.

The video that started it all

3rd Quarter Independent Reading Reflection: The Boring Part (Sorry Mrs. Leitsch)

Books I've read this quarter from most difficult to least difficult is as follows:

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon (No literally, everything was in lowercase)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Art of Racing in the Rain By Garth Stein
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
The Limit by Kristen Landon

So my goals were to

1: Read at least 7 books

2: Read a book from the fantasy genre and a book from the mystery genre.

     I'd say I completed both of those goals. I read 8 books this quarter and Walton's The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is fantasy while the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon is mystery/realistic fiction.

     As for goals for this final quarter, well, we have 2 months left, 2 months = 8 weeks. So let's try to read 1 book a week totaling up for 8 books this month. Additionally, I want to read at least 1 book from 4 different genres this quarter: Romance, Horror, Thriller (Horror and Thriller are different, right?) and Historical fiction.