今天关注了网易公开课上TED的一堂课，莱温斯基讲的《羞辱的代价》。时隔多年之后，她站出来说话，虽说与政治无关，可是谁信呢！暂且不管这些了，她所提到的网络欺凌的问题，确实在当代的社会已经成为了一个大问题了。

生活在现在这个喜欢制造噱头、喜欢爆炸性信息的时代，不管你愿不愿意、不管你做没做好准备，你都有可能成为下一个网络时代的牺牲品，名人也罢，平常人也罢，网络语境中的你我他，都生活的战战兢兢、如履薄冰。

对于网络欺凌的参与者来说，很多时候大家都是抱着好奇的心态，用自己所谓的道德标准、人生格言去指责他人与教导他人，也许他们只是随便的表达了一下自己的瞬间想法，多数人在发言的时候，几乎不会站在对方的角度上考虑问题的，更为甚至是在自己发言之后，很快也就忘记，根本就意识不到自己语言的攻击性，以及对他人造成的危害，这种一吐为快的心态，促成了很多鲁莽的、不负责的行为。

而对于网络欺凌的受害者来说，别太纠结于别人的眼光，活给自己看，总比活给别人看，要容易活的多。有一个词叫“接受”，对于自己无力回天的事情，那就接受好了，然后再在自己能力所及的范围内，进行及时的补救，要是事情完全超出自己的空间，那就随便它好了，还是那句老话，改变不了别人，那就改变自己好了，只要自己原谅了自己，只要自己接受了自己，还有什么看不开的呢！人生也就不断短短的几十年，别再他人介意的眼光里，葬送了自己的人生。

附演讲稿英文版

The priceof shame

You'relooking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that'schanged, but only recently.

It was several months ago that I gave my very first major publictalk at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit:1,500 brilliant people, all under the ageof 30. That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, andthe youngest, just four. I joked with them that some might only have heard ofme from rap songs. Yes, I'm in rap songs. Almost 40 rap songs.

But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. At theage of 41, I was hit onby a 27-year-old guy. I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. You know whathis unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. I realizedlater that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be22 again.

At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of24, I learned the devastating consequences.

Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistakeor do something they regretted at 22? Yep. That's what I thought. So like me,at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with thewrong person, maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probablywasn't the president of the United States of America. Of course, life is fullof surprises.

Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and Iregret that mistake deeply.

In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, Iwas then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we hadnever seen before. Remember, just a few years earlier,news was consumed fromjust three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, orwatching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, thisscandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we couldaccess all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere, andwhen the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first timethe traditional news was usurpedby the Internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world.

What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went frombeing a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero oflosing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.

This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtualstone-throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could stillcomment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. News sources plastered photosof me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned tothe TV. Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret?

Now, I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret. Butthe attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that Ipersonally received, was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore,bimbo, and, of course, that woman. I was seen by many but actually known byfew. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul,and was once unbroken.

When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.Now we call it cyberbullying(网络欺凌)andonline harassment(网络骚扰).Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how thatexperience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my pastexperience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others.

In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost almosteverything, and I almost lost my life.

Let me paint a picture for you. It is September of 1998. I'msitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the IndependentCounsel underneath hummingfluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice onsurreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the yearbefore. I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticateall 20 hours of taped conversation. For the past eight months, the mysteriouscontent of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can rememberwhat they said a year ago? Scaredand mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of theday; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, myheartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply,deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize.

A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, andall of those tapes and transcripts,those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts ishorrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, andsignificant portionsmade available online. The public humiliation was excruciating. Life was almost unbearable.

This was not something that happened with regularity back then in1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions,conversations or photos, and then making them public -- public without consent,public without context, and public without compassion.

Fast forward 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born.The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine,whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now it's for both publicand private people. The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.

I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we weretalking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers Universitynamed Tyler Clementi. Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammedby his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online worldlearned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few dayslater, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18.

My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and hisfamily, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quiteunderstand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving atime when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made meshower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parentsfeared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.

Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in andrescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child's suffering andhumiliation after it was too late. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was aturning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at theworld of humiliation and bullyingaround me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing wherethis brave new technology called the Internet would take us. Since then, it hasconnected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives,launching revolutions, but the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that Iexperienced had mushroomed.Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentallyequipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagineliving to the next day, and some, tragically, don't, and there's nothing virtual about that.ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on variousissues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013,there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying.A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time,cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offlinebullying. And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn't have, was otherresearch last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely feltemotion than either happiness or even anger.

Crueltyto others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming isamplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassmentused to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, butnow it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with theirwords, and that's a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publiclyobserve you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation,and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price.

For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seedsof shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, realityprogramming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame.It's led to desensitizationand a permissive environment online which lends itself to trolling, invasion ofprivacy, and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor NicolausMills calls a culture of humiliation. Consider a few prominentexamples just from the past six months alone. Snapchat, the service which isused mainly by younger generationsand claims that its messages only have thelifespan of a few seconds. You can imagine the range of content that that gets.A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the lifespan of themessages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos, and videoswere leaked online to now have a lifespan of forever. Jennifer Lawrence andseveral other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate,nude photos were plastered across the Internet without their permission. Onegossip website had over five million hits for this one story. And what aboutthe Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The documents which received the most attentionwere private emails that had maximum public embarrassment value.

But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of pricetag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to thevictim, which Tyler and too many others, notably women, minorities, and membersof the LGBTQ community have paid, but the price measures the profit of thosewho prey on them. This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently andruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emergedwhere public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is themoney made? Clicks.The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.We're in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the morenumb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more weclick. All the while,someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering.With every click, we make a choice. The more we saturate our culture withpublic shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior likecyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking, and online harassment. Why?Because they all have humiliation at their cores. This behavior is a symptom ofthe culture we've created. Just think about it.

Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. We've seen that tobe true with racism,homophobia, and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we'vechanged beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equalfreedoms. When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle.So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a culturalrevolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for anintervention on the Internet and in our culture.

The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We needto return to a long-held value of compassion -- compassion and empathy. Online,we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.

Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, "Shame can't survive empathy."Shame cannot survive empathy. I've seen some very dark days in my life, and itwas the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals, andsometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make adifference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologistSerge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency overtime, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influenceby becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we canpost a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me,compassionate comments help abate the negativity. We can also counteract theculture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, likethe Tyler Clementi Foundation in the U.S., In the U.K., there's Anti-BullyingPro, and in Australia, there's Project Rockit.

We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but weneed to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We allwant to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up withintention and speaking up for attention. The Internet is the superhighway forthe id, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps createa safer and better world. We need to communicate online with compassion,consume news with compassion, and click with compassion. Just imagine walking amile in someone else's headline. I'd like to end on a personal note. In thepast nine months, the question I've been asked the most is why. Why now? Why wasI sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in thosequestions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics.

The top note answer was and is because it's time: time to stop tip-toeing around mypast; time to stop living a life of opprobrium; and time to take back my narrative. It's also not just about savingmyself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You cansurvive it. I know it's hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but youcan insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself.We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a morecompassionate world.