The story below is of a Georgia teen who was embarrassment by a photograph the school of used of her, and sued the Georgia School District for $2 million for emotional distress. Read and comment below, and/or answer the questions.
When is embarrassment something you bring upon yourself, and when is someone else guilty of embarrassing you? Which is this a case of? Of the five categories of damage, should embarrassment be the most valuable, least valuable, or somewhere in between?
Alex Gage comment #5
ReplyDeletewell embarrassing yourself is when you consent to something and do it yourself which could be very embarrassing. in essence when you embarrass yourself, you are doing something with your own willingness and the end result is you becoming embarrassed.However, this could not always be the case. Sometimes people do things to embarrass you whether or not they want to or not. This case did embarrass the student immensely even though the school had no intention. the school posted a picture of this girl wearing a bikini without her permission and when her peers saw this it must have humiliated the girl. I do not think that the girl should have gone this far with a $2,000,000 lawsuit but I do think that the Georgia school along with others will hopefully learn from this mistake.
I think its important to note (and for all commentators below) that the girl's photo was taken from her Facebook page- it was essentially 'public'- the school used its 'publicness' in an assembly to show how reckless it is to post anything to the net. Kind of ironic.
DeleteAlex Ravioli comment #7
ReplyDeleteEmbarrassing yourself is when you do something humiliating or do something crazy and you make yourself look shameful. When you decide to shame yourself you know that you will become really embarrassed and it is your own will to do such a thing. There are people out there who like to embarrass themselves on social networks and on youtube. There are also cases when other people pull pranks on you or do things to you that will embarrass you whether you want it or not. When someone else embarrasses you to a point where your social status goes down, you feel to uncomfortable to be in public, you are always getting laughed at, or other bad things that is when the other person should be guilty. When the school posted the picture of this girl wearing a bikini they did not know it would embarrass her. The school posted without the girls permission and when her friends saw it she was humiliated and felt uncomfortable. This must have been really embarrasing the law suit was right but not for 2 million $$. I think the school should be sorry for what they did and compensate some money for it. I believe embarrasment is somewhere towards the top of the 5 categories because embarrassment could really hurt a person and bring them down both mentally and physically.
matthew
ReplyDeleteIf you embarrass yourself it is different from when you are embarrassed by someone else. this can be shown by if a person is sagging there pants very low and they fall down is different than if i was to go up to someone and pull there pants down. I believe that emotional pain is the hardest to overcome. if you break your arm it can heal overtime, but if you are emotionally scared by an incident that whenever you hear a certain noise it causes you to do embarrassing things or for you to harm yourself is worse than any other pain you can have.
Ariane #6
ReplyDeleteThere is a huge difference between embarrassed provoked by yourself and another. If you were doing something that had the chance of being made fun of or to embarrass you, then you should've been ready to accept the consequences of the thing that you were doing ahead of time. You are responsible for your actions and if those actions could result in you looking foolish, then you should be prepared. On the other hand, if you were doing nothing wrong and minding your own business and someone comes and embarrasses you, whether on purpose or on accident, that is not okay. I they make something a huge deal, they tell everyone, make fun of you, or anything that could make the situation worse, then they are responsible for the embarrassment. I agree with Matthew that emotional pain is worse than physical. Most of the time, you are able to recover from whatever your injury was, but it is very hard to overcome your emotions and to suppress them. Embarrassment is a very valuable damage that is needed to compensate, but determining exactly the compensation for it is the difficulty.
Evelin Comment #6
ReplyDeleteI think that embarrassing yourself and being embarrassed by some else is a completely different thing. One could argue that because Chelsea posted the picture on facebook , she was provoking others to embarrass her. The school although did not have the right to use the picture of her without her permission. The school was liable for the actions. They used a provocative picture of a student without the student consenting. It was foul play and I think that Chelsea had the right to sue the school. Embarrassment should be in between because, on one hand, you could be doing nothing and minding your own business and someone could embarrass you out of the blue. That is pretty harsh and does damage. But if someone calls you out on something that was your fault and it happens to embarrass you than I think it doesn't do much harm.
Adira Brown #2 of second set
ReplyDeleteI think Ariane hit all the bases. I completely agree with her in that there is a huge difference in self provoked embarrassment and embarrassment that is derived from others. That being said however, the line is a little bit unclear between the two. When posting something online with the potential of being embarrassed, it does not mean someone is asking for it. If we speak in "potentials," potentially everything we do could be asking to be embarrassed. It is those who seek to embarrass other people who often cause the most problems. When posting a picture of myself on Instagram, I am exposing myself to all of my followers however, I am not intentionally seeking to be teased or mocked. Self provoked embarrassment can only be classified as such if the person mocks them self to seek negative attention. Secondly, I believe that although we can differentiate between emotional and physical embarrassment, they usually come together. When one is embarrassed physically, it often comes with emotional damage, which is the hardest thing to recover from and is the most necessary to compensate for.
Laurel Esstman #8
ReplyDeletehttp://www.teenvogue.com/my-life/2013-11/cassidy-wolf-hacking
In this article Miss teen USA had the potential to be embarrassed by her hacker. It wasn't her fault she was being spied on through her camera, she did not bring this upon herself. Although so may say that being Miss Teen USA she did but how was she suppose to know someone could hack into her webcam? If she wouldn't have told someone or didn't do what he asked she could have been so embarrassed he had pictures of her in her bedroom those pictures could have gone viral. I think out of the five categories damages should be in-between because it is important not to hurt people by publicly embarrassing them but i think some of the others are more important because they deal with physical and emotional pain where embarrassment would only deal with the emotional pain of being embarrassment. Overall i do not know how to rank one more valuable than another because it just depends on the situation.
Adina Kalanterov Comment #10
ReplyDeleteI have been embarrassed many times in my life. Whether i chose to put my self in that situation or not. For example, there were many times when this school posted pictures of me on face book without my consent, and i did not like that certain picture. Just because it embarrassed me does not mean that i will sue my school for a picture that i can ask them to delete. In this article, the girl was both emotionally and physically embarrassed. I think that there is no difference between those two. Either way, you are embarrassed and ashamed of what happened, no matter of it is emotional or not. If you are physically embarrassed, there is emotional damage as well. They both come together and they are both very difficult to compensate for.
Everyone in this world has something to be embarrassed of and at one point in there lives something embarrassing will happen. It is normal for everyone to be humiliated at one point in their lives, but sometimes people intentionally humiliate people. For example: on youtube people post videos all the time of people doing idiotic things, most of the time the people in the video are unaware that it wads posted. It is humiliating because people who have seen the video only look at the person as the idiot that did a stupid thing. When people become embarrassed there should be a payment to whoever was humiliated without consent.
ReplyDeleteSam Comment #9
ReplyDeleteThis was a case in which this person brought the shame upon herself. Her Facebook was never logged into by anyone except her, and the photos were used entirely legally, as stated in the licence agreement for when she signed up for an account. In this case, she should be compensated nothing. However, in the case of the article that Laurel mentioned, that was blackmail, and the embarrassment was not caused by herself, and as such should be compensated for. In general, I place shame tied for first with damage, because they are both permanent, while none of the others are.