Hi, podcast listeners. I'm here with a midweek on the media special. Last month, Monica Lewinsky made a surprise return to the public stage in the form of a TED talk titled The Price of Shame. In the talk, she spoke candidly about what happened to her in 1998 at the age of 24.

Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one

worldwide.

An unprecedented shaming made possible by the World Wide Web.

Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places, reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, or watching television.

That was it.

But that wasn't my fate.

Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution.

Lewinsky then situated her own peculiar situation into that context.

She was, she said, patience zero in what became, as we all know, a pandemic.

When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.

Now we call it cyberbullying and online harassment.

The talk was a smash hit, tapping into concerns we all share that the game has changed.

We leave huge digital footprints. What is known about us is known everywhere and cannot be unknown.

Journalist John Ronson tackles just this phenomenon in his book, so you've been publicly

shamed.

Here's our interview.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

It's nice to be here.

Now, this enterprise started when some academic hackers decided to launch a John Ronson spam bot, right?

Yeah. The problem was that I accidentally typed my name into Google and discovered.

...