Fixation Nation: Coldplay and the Art of Public Shaming

It’s difficult to hide when you are pictured on a Jumbotron in a stadium filled with thousands of people. But when the live feed went up during a Coldplay concert this past week, it just happened to reveal something of a viral “gotcha” moment. A tech CEO was caught in a romantic embrace with his director of human resources – an inappropriate moment, given both were married, and not to each other. The brief video garnered tens of millions of views, and it’s not over yet, leading one to wonder why this caught the national zeitgeist.

So why do we care? Good question. Some, like Kat Rosenfield over at The Free Press, suggest that the public fixation with this event doesn’t speak well of us. “It was a full-bore public shaming, imbued with an unhinged and vicious glee that we hadn’t experienced since, well, the last time millions of strangers rallied to the cause of destroying someone’s life …”

That’s one way to look at it. But perhaps it isn’t so much about ruining people. Maybe, instead, it demonstrates who we are and what we value.

The history of public shaming is long. One can go back to biblical times when the adulterous woman was shunned and ultimately stoned as a form of punishment. Fast forward to Colonial America, when putting folks in stocks were popular. This form of public punishment brought over from England involved restraining a person’s legs in a wooden frame – usually at the town square – leaving them secured in place and exposed for ridicule and humiliation. Let’s just say it was an effective – albeit repugnant – form of discipline.

In his book Shame: A Brief History, Dr. Peter Stearns, Provost Emeritus Professor of History at George Mason University, noted: “Shame is thus one of the ‘self-conscious’ emotions, along with pride, humiliation, embarrassment and guilt, that forms or may form a significant aspect of individual emotional life, but that depends on group standards and – to some extent at least – group enforcement.”

But by the turn of the 19th century, the tide began to shift, and public stocks were relegated to the woodshed.  Shaming was shamed. Out with the old and in with the new: Attributes like confidence and self-esteem were bolstered, according to Stearns. But shame didn’t really end – it just went underground.

Teachers employed it often. Some of the most popular methods of public shaming in schools included having students stand in the corner, wear a dunce cap, or having to stick chewing gum to the nose for violating the no-gum school policy. It was designed to promote humiliation and embarrassment, and it worked.

Thus, in one form or another, public shaming has always been a part of civilized society, which brings us back to our Coldplay Jumbotron couple.

Coldplay Sings a Song of Morality

As online sleuths dug up information about these two lovebirds and their work status became known, things worsened for them, and the public humiliation began to unfold. She turned out to be a director of human resources. These are the folks who set the cultural parameters in the workplace, and those rubrics certainly don’t include this sort of behavior with the company CEO. The sense that one gets here is that most people see this relationship outside their separate marriages as wrong, and that’s a good thing.

Not to get too far into the weeds, but it’s worth taking a moment to explore why 21st-century American social standards still hold this as improper behavior when so much of our early American morality heritage has crumbled.

First, there is the basic sense of right and wrong. Although people may not follow them, most are familiar with the Ten Commandments from the Bible – and this incident violates one of them. However, even for those who have no biblical awareness, it’s easy to understand the world of hurt it brings into a family when someone cheats. In this case, there are two spouses and several children who have been injured. Where Kat Rosenfield goes awry is in blaming the American public for the injury to the families. This pain was not caused by the number of people who commented on it, but rather by the cheating couple who put their own desires before their commitments to their respective families.

The fact that these two individuals hold elevated positions within the same company also plays a part in this contemporary Greek tragedy. With leadership comes responsibility. Leaders are generally held to a higher standard, and most believe they should behave as role models. The two people involved were clearly ashamed of their behavior: Why else would they have turned around and ducked away from the camera? The fact that they demonstrated public shame is also a good thing. They were busted, and there was no getting away from it. They knew what they were doing was wrong on both personal and professional levels.

Rather than seeing the American reaction to this odd and uncomfortable Coldplay event as “monstrous,” we might want to consider it as revealing a sense of our national moral compass. Perhaps we should be encouraged that technology has successfully ushered in the art of public shaming rather than blaming the messenger.

1. The CEO and HR director of a company – both of whom were married, and not to each other – were caught in a scandalous relationship at a Coldplay concert on the Jumbotron.
2. The video went viral, with millions of people shaming the couple.
3. Some think this trend of public shaming is monstrous – but could it be a good thing, instead, to point out and shame bad behavior in public?