We Live in Public
Friday, July 24, 2009 by anna
Here's the synopsis:
On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.
Josh Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web,” founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also created his vision of the future: an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the turn of the millennium. (The project, named QUIET, also became the subject of Ondi Timoner’s first cut of her documentary about Harris. Her film shared the project’s name.) With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.
For me it raised far more questions than I have answers and I've found doing a fair bit of future gazing and looking very closely in the rear view mirror. Reflecting on the future that theorists and media/technology commentators predicted a decade ago, many of those visions have been realised, just not always quite in the fully utopian or distopian ways that were predicted. Personally I think the development of the technology itself feels quite slow relative to our adoption of it, which I do find slightly disquieting.If anyone else has seen the film I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If you haven't seen it I'm fairly sure it will get a general release here soon.