Scott Brown on Shame and the Internet Age

First and foremost, I’m sorry. For what, I’m not entirely sure, but I know I will come up with something. Mostly, I’m sorry because sorry is the thing to be: We live in a Sorry Age. Public apologies used to be the exclusive realm of celebrities, politicians, and corporations — the intern humpers and oil dumpers of the world — and we, the little folk, were the scandal connoisseurs and redemption dispensers: They screwed up, and we got to (a) feel briefly superior and (b) judge the sincerity of their apologias. But in a world of constant, ambient, thought-speed communication, there are no more Humilerati. Apologies are no longer a luxury market; they’re going retail, and fast. The flip side of Anyone Can Be a Celebrity is Everyone’s a Candidate for the Stocks.

After all, you don’t need talent, wealth, or power to post something offensive, not safe for work, or simply indiscreet and impolitic in a status update: Average Joes and Janes have been fired for just such indiscretions. You don’t have to travel with an army of paparazzi to end up with embarrassing and/or ass-baring photographs tagged to your profile. (How to preserve that lucrative endorsement deal with Your Mom in the wake of the table-dancing montage uploaded by some skeezy dude you met at ladies’ night?) You’re always one “hilarious” or “irreverent” or “edgy” or “spontaneous” tweet away from needing @bsolution just as much as Kanye does. In a self-surveilled society, when all of our half-cocked antics are shared with, at minimum, a few hundred people, every miscalculated bon mot, whoopsie up-skirt TwitPic, and awkward late-night revelation can have you spending the rest of your day playing out that all-too-familiar celebrity-crisis script: evade, laugh it off, spin, apologize, spin some more, then change your profile photo to a picture of a kitten and go dark until it eventually blows over.

And that’s just the garden-variety stuff. Thanks to instant distribution, a personal scandal can occasionally engulf the entire globe. You don’t need a famous name, or any name, or even a face. Last summer, a random Briton tossed a cat in a trash can while an out-of-focus security camera looked on; the righteous trolls at 4chan found Cat-Trashing Lady within a day and led the public to her door, literally, via Google maps. (An apology followed within 24 hours.) Much the same thing happened to Girl in a Red Hoodie, who was videotaped throwing puppies into a river: In a stunning reversal of the peasant-celebrity scandal food chain, no less a Hollywood eminence than Michael Bay demanded the puppy-drowner be brought to justice, and he offered a handsome reward for any information leading to her arrest.