Lessons from Patient Zero

She described how it felt "to watch yourself -- or your name and likeness -- be ripped apart online. ... For me, that was every day in 1998. There was a rotation of worsening name-calling and descriptions of me. I would go online, read in a paper or see on TV people referring to me as: tramp, slut, whore, tart, bimbo, floozy, even spy. The New York Post's Page Six took to calling me, almost daily, the Portly Pepperpot. I was shattered."

This is where Lewinsky's effort can be most helpful. Few of us, thankfully, will be subjected to a Lewinsky-level public shaming. But many of us, and many of our children, will suffer the cyber slings and arrows of Internet-enabled humiliation and abuse.

Since Lewinsky's moment, the mechanisms for humiliation and the venues for abuse have multiplied. Imagine Linda Tripp with a webcam and smart phone. Imagine the episode in the age of Twitter and Facebook.

Lewinsky says she was moved to come forward by the experience of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate secretly taped and streamed video of Clementi kissing another man.

"Having survived myself, what I want to do now is help other victims of the shame game survive too," Lewinsky said. "What we need is a radical change in attitudes -- on the Internet, mobile platforms and in the society of which they are a part."

Indeed, the response to Lewinsky's speech -- and to her decision, either courageous or foolhardy, to join Twitter -- only serves to underscore the ugliness she decries. "#HereWeGo," Lewinsky wrote in her maiden tweet, and so the twitterverse did, in all its predictable coarseness.

If Lewinsky's solution to this "compassion deficit" feels unformed -- well, she's not the only one who is struggling with how to re-civilize society. Simply going public may be Lewinsky's greatest service. A parent trying to comfort a teenager victimized by cyber-bullies can point to Lewinsky and say: If she can survive, so can you.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.