I don't think so. You should check out Brenee Brown's research/books on shame. Her claim is that guilt can be a useful emotion, but shame is pretty ineffective at everything.
I tend to agree with the take and I think it's useful to differentiate between the two.
> "Guilt is cognitive dissonance. Guilt says, I've done something or failed to do something that is aligned with my values. And it feels awful. I need to make amends, make a change and hold myself accountable. I need to fix it."
> Shame, however, is a lot more damaging according to Brown, as it says "you are a bad person", and as a social species, "shame is death".
The Last Psychiatrist blog was obsessed with narcissism, their model of it was that people have a self-image such as "I am a great man", "I am a good mother", "I am a proper Christian", "I am a success with a nice house and sports car and attractive blonde partner" and their main priority is making sure that everyone else has the same image of them as they have. That things which damage the image anger narcissists more than anything else.
In that model, shame is "I wish you hadn't caught me doing that because you will think less of me and I can't accept that". Guilt is "I wish I hadn't done that because it harmed other people and other people matter" which extreme narcissists don't feel. That is, the child who has torn clothes and one parent worries that the child might be hurt under their watch, compared to the parent who punishes the child for making them look like a worse parent to all the bystanders.
And that pattern is something to see everywhere, from internet arguments to international news.
i.e. guilt is [1] "Greek transport minister Kostas Karamanlis has resigned following a rail crash which killed at least 38 people; Mr Karamanlis said he felt it was his “duty” to step down “as a basic indication of respect for the memory of the people who died so unfairly”"
Shame is [2] Turkey blocking social media immediately after the recent earthquake and arresting people who posted things which made the government look bad. Instead of first thought being to the injured or the corruption, it was trying to control how the government looks and punishing those who hurt that image.
Guilt is not something social media can encourage - the other people are names on a screen, far away.
But a focus on your image, the image you present to the world, the perfect life you live, the perfect friends you have, the beautiful places you go, the clever knowledge you have, the busy Github commit log, the witty Twitter stream, those kinds of things are what social media promotes uncomfortably well.
When someone sees you crying or without makeup, that's not the macho or beautiful Instagram image you've cultivated, harm done - to you, to your image - shame shame shame emergency response damage control, post something which puts it in context and explains it, attack back. When you call someone an unfunny moron on Twitter, no harm done but when someone calls you an unfunny moron, damage control - the world must think of me as witty and inciteful because that's all I have on Twitter and if I lose that, I'm nobody, attack back.
i.e. the phones are a proxy, reading a book with other people around instead of talking to them can still feel sociable. Seeing beautiful people on a billboard advert has been a thing for decades. The projection of yourself to the world, text, pictures, videos, blogs, streams, to an internet where all there is is a projection of you which you have to control, seems like more of a problem.
TBH I think our political system and most of our OpEd pages could benefit from an infusion of shame. Many of them are bad people and continue having prominent roles due to their complete lack of shame. Maybe in psychologically healthy people it’s ineffective, but we do live in a world stalked by psychopaths and I have to believe the shame response evolved to put a check on them.
I feel that the big mid-2015s transition was that shaming reached such critical levels that a whole chunk of public figures flipped to shamelessness, like antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
"Oh you're pointing out something I've done that doesn't align with my stated value system or common decency? Who cares, and I'll do it again"
