Monica Lewinsky’s “15 Minutes of Shame”: 5 Things Explored About Cropping Canceling In The Doc

In recent years, the culture of cancellation has grabbed the headlines.

Many, including Hollywood stars, have come under intense public scrutiny on a variety of topics or actions, sometimes resulting in someone being canceled, meaning their careers and lives personal collapse due to increased negative publicity.

“15 Minutes of Shame,” a new documentary on HBO Max, was produced by Monica Lewinsky, who describes herself as “patient zero” to public shame. The doc examines the cancellation culture, the science behind it, its historical origins and more.

Here’s a look at five angles explored on culture cancellation and public humiliation in the film:

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ATTENTION: The video below contains graphic language.

It goes back centuries

Dr Tiffany Watt Smith, cultural historian at Queen Mary University in London, reflected on the early days of public humiliation, explaining that societies of the past often required people to come together and follow rules such as no not accumulate resources.

“These kinds of companies punish very quickly and very severely anyone who tries to take more than their fair share, anyone who thinks they shouldn’t play by the rules,” she said. “Societies throughout the ages have had this strange process of ritualized public humiliation.”

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Anonymity can make shame worse

A lot of times when people get canceled, it’s a crowd of strangers, as is regularly the case with celebrities.

It turns out that such anonymity makes it easier for critics to go on the offensive.

“When someone is just a name on a screen with part of their text and maybe a stranger you’ve never met, that’s not enough information for our human brain fully perceive him as a human, ”explained Dr Helen Weng. , neuroscientist and psychologist, who studies the processing of emotions.

“A quick way for our brains to understand other people’s mental states is to visualize people’s faces and body language. And our brains process that information very, very quickly,” she continued. “If we don’t have access to this information through the Internet, then it is more difficult for us to think about what that person might be thinking or feeling.”

The term “cancel culture” dates back to the early 1990s

While “cancel culture” may sound like a relatively new term, writer and internet culture journalist Aja Romano has revealed that he hails from 1990s pop culture.

In the 1991 movie “New Jack City”, Wesley Snipes uses the phrase “cancel that bitch, I’m going to buy another one” when breaking up with a woman.

Romano then points to a December 2014 episode of “Love & Hip Hop” in which a man tells a woman she is “canceled” after revealing that she has a daughter.

“It started from there,” said the journalist. “People started to use it with humor at first, then it’s sort of [caught on]. “

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Humans Release ‘Dopamine’ When They See Someone Called

“There are studies that show that dopamine is released when we see a transgressor punished,” Smith said. “I think it’s possible that we are just chasing that blow that we get when we see someone that we have perceived to be a wrongdoer, get their reward.”

Smith is an expert on schadenfreude, “the pleasure you get in seeing someone else’s misfortune,” as she put it.

The historian then recalled a Dutch study of football fans that examined the faces of fans watching a team they were fans of scoring a goal, as well as videos of an opposing team missing a goal.

“To these videos [of the rivals missing], that’s when they smiled the widest and fastest, ”Smith explained.“ It wasn’t to see their own team score, it was to see their rivals miss a goal.”

Social media algorithms can promote negative content

Tech ethicist Tristan Harris recalled a NYU study that found that “for every word of moral outrage” – such as “horrible”, “shame” and “abomination” – added to a tweet on Twitter, the ” Retweet “rate of this post increased by 13%.

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Tweets with higher engagement are promoted by algorithms on social media platforms, which means they are profitable, according to Harris.

UCLA professor and author Safiya Noble echoed these sentiments, explaining that social media algorithms are not “neutral and objective” but focus on “bringing attention to material on their platforms” .

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More of those eyeballs make more money for social media platforms, which means they’ll be promoting clicks, Harris explained.