It may seem as if we are living in a shameless age of tawdry scandals and unrepentant greed. But shame - or at least shaming - may be staging a comeback.

Though each generation has its villains, ours may be finding it harder to hide. Lately, actions brazen and outrageous even for these times risk being publicly exposed, ridiculed and, yes, shamed with the modern, social media equivalent of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter.

So kitten abusers beware. In England last year, a cat hater was exposed on YouTube and Facebook after she abandoned an animal in a trash bin.

Once discovered, she received a $400 fine, officially. Online, however, the punishment was public ridicule and death threats.

A few years ago in China, an online video of a high-heeled woman stomping a small cat to death went viral, driving an army of indignant “Netizens” into an impassioned search for the evildoer.

As The Times reported, she may have been one in a nation of 1.3 billion people, but the intense exposure on the Web prompted what the Chinese call a “human-flesh” search. And within only six days, the incensed Web posse identified Wang Jiao of Luobei in Heilongjiag Province. She was dismissed from her government job and driven out of her town and into hiding.

“We have always wanted to shame people who did bad things,” Malcolm Gladwell, an author , told The Times. “Now it’s cheap to do it. It’s easy to break down the barriers.”

On a practical level, the new shame can make the world safer. Brett Ligon, the district attorney in Montgomery, Texas, has been posting the names of drunken drivers on Twitter.

“There is an embarrassment factor, the scarlet letter of law enforcement,” Mr. Ligon told The Times. “If embarrassing someone was what it took to stop someone from driving drunk, I’m all for it.” There are also obvious advantages when companies fear public embarrassment on consumer blogs. And the dating scene may be safer when boorish cads (or violent sex offenders) are exposed on Facebook.

But some fear the consequences of mob justice running amok on the Web, where the court of public opinion makes its own laws.

“If you cast stones and see people bloodied and crying, you might think you’ve gone too far,” Daniel J. Solove, a privacy-law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told The Times. “The problem is, you don’t see that online.”

Of course, certain disreputable actions can always up the ante of shame. Like cheating on your spouse at home.

As The Times reported, “Even in a sexually liberated culture, the home is still usually off-limits, as if protected by an invisible force field. And the marriage bed - a phrase that in itself seems quaintly out-of-date - remains a sacred object.”

Few relationships survive an extramarital fling in the marriage bed. And the beds don’t fare too well either.

One wife discovered that her husband had had an affair in their bed with the nanny, Susan Bender, a New York divorce lawyer, told The Times. So she lured her husband into sex. But instead of completing the act, she set the bed on fire and left him, naked, to fight the flames.

The husband might have been able to press charges, Ms. Bender said. But the couple settled quietly out of court.

The fear of public shame was too great.


KEVIN DELANEY