15 Minutes of Shame

The best documentaries give you a fresh insight into a topic. That’s what they’re for, after all: to be informative. To educate. 15 Minutes Of Shame intends to do that. Keep that word in mind: intends. Throughout the 85 minute runtime. 15 Minutes explores the concept of public shaming and how, in the digital age, it can be a weapon of change or a storm out of control. Multiple people are brought on and interviewed to discuss how they had brief flirtations with fame via social media shaming: the guy who hoarded 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer at the beginning of COVID, or a guy who appeared to be flashing a white supremacist hand sign near a BLM rally. The movie lets them tell their side of the story, and uses that to springboard into discussion about how social media tends to jump into the pool without looking at how much water is in there. Someone is held up, and social media burns them at the stake without thinking of context, or the person behind it. What if it was something innocent?, this movie asks. What if the guy flashing the hand gesture was cracking his knuckles? Why do people feel so emboldened behind a keyboard? Is this contributing to the erosion of compassion and decency? And the movie makes great points about these using not only these people, but experts in psychology, criminal law, and other related fields. There’s no doubt that online mobs CAN destroy someone’s life based on the tiniest of morsels of “information”. There’s no doubt that social media has polarized people like never before. There’s no doubt the legal system is broken in regards to handling cyber-bullying and bad actors. That’s all well and good. But the movie makes a few mistakes in this regard. The first is painting with a broad and mostly negative brush. Positive things like the Arab Spring, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter are given the most cursory glances on the way to “look how this poor guy got humiliated”. Yes, the focus of the movie is supposed to be on the negative side, but for a movie that spends a lot of time talking about context and nuance and how these situations can get blown out of proportion without it, it sure doesn’t allow for much nuance or context itself. The other problem is the bigger one, what I referred to in the first paragraph. Whatever this movie’s intentions are to educate about cyber-bullying and the negative side of facing online consequences, most people already know. Nothing about this is really new information. It offers no fresh takes, no solutions, no different insight. Plenty of people already know it’s a double-edged sword. The ones who don’t, don’t care, and wouldn’t listen anyway. So this movie is preaching to the choir. And that leaves the movie a bit rudderless. Other than finding out the other side of the story from a couple of people who caused the Twitter outrage machine to spin once or twice, you’ll come away with this with very little new information. Maybe an urge to delete your Twitter. Now that I think about it, that would be a net positive.