If you ever read Thomas Friedman’s columns or books, you know the world is flat. The lowering of trade barriers, the globalization of business and entertainment and — most important — the exponential growth of the Internet has created a world where shrimp from Vietnam and peaches from China can grace your table, and after dinner, you can chat with folks from India with the stroke of a key.
In such a flattening world, it would seem, small-town culture — where everyone knows everyone’s name, and all their dirty secrets — disappears. As we gain instant access to more and more far-flung corners of the Earth, society becomes more like an infinitely larger New York City. The sheer size of the population means anonymity reigns. Anything goes, since there are so many people in this flattened world that it’s really unlikely anybody’s looking.
So it would seem. But some recent news stories suggest it’s not so — that as the world flattens, it becomes less like New York and more like a small town of old.
One of the strangest phenomena associated with the growth of the Internet is the rebirth of small-town-style public shaming. We tend to think of public as an increasingly powerful mode of revenge the smaller and more insular the society. Take one of America’s founding fables, “The Scarlet Letter”: In old small-town Boston, adulteress Hester Prynne had to walk around wearing a shame-inducing red “A” on her chest as punishment for her transgression. Had she lived in modern, big-city Boston, she could’ve just moved out to Cambridge.
Ed Hicks, the man who was caught last year in Fairfax County for marrying seven different women across the country, kept up his adultery for years thanks to the ease by which, in modern society, we can now pick up and change location. Posting online profiles describing himself as “in love with love,” Hicks used the Internet to find far-away prospects who were unaware of his history.
But increasingly, the Internet is also being used to insistently link people with their deeds, as the old scarlet “A” did for Hester Prynne.
On June 21, The New York Times published an incredible story about how a woman recently retrieved her stolen Sidekick cell phone. She didn’t file a police complaint — at least, not at first. Instead, by logging into her account remotely, she discovered the America Online screen name and personal information of the Sidekick’s happy new owner, whose name was Sasha. The woman had a tech-savvy friend put up a Web site explaining what happened and posting Sasha’s info.
What happened next was a zeitgeist experience. The Web site garnered literally thousands of sympathetic e-mails, some from lawyers and police officers offering advice. The story was bandied around on Internet forums and online roundup sites like Digg, and one sympathetic reader even posted a rap about the episode on MySpace. Gossip hounds knocked on Sasha’s door in Queens and spammed her with e-mails. Thanks to the Web site, Sasha’s brother, who is in the military, got in trouble with his superior officers.
In the end, the police arrested the hapless Sasha, who, as it turned out, had bought the stolen Sidekick from a hawker in the subway. That’s only a misdemeanor. But the small-town-style ruining of Sasha’s reputation, the black mark on her family members — that damage will last. Thanks to the humiliating Web site, people across the world knew Sasha’s name and what she had done.
Before the Internet, modern society had reduced the power of shame to enforce social norms and exact revenge. Now, that process is going in reverse. Web sites are sprouting up to publicly out exploitative companies (ripoffreport.com) and bad boyfriends (ihatemen.com’s Dating Woes) by name.
I’m waiting for the day when Craigslist’s famous anonymous rants start naming names, creating a kind of Shameonyou.com: That’s when I can tell Tom Friedman the world may be flat, but it’s still got that small-town feel after all.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
