Can We Still Live in Private?
Being born a millennial, aspects of our digital world have become almost second hand and common sense for me. It’s something that has existed for most of our memory, and we have never known a time where an online world didn’t exist. Ondi Timoner’s film We Live In Public brings the viewer back to a time when the internet was still so new and incomprehensible to many, except at least one, Josh Harris.
Josh Harris saw the future of our online digital world before anyone else, and he was able to see how it would change our humanity and shape our society. He predicted that our society would eventually “live in public,” and in 2017, nearly two decades later, he was right. We have reached the point where social media dominates our lifestyle almost completely, and Edward Snowden showed the world that we truly do live in a surveillance society, much like the underground bunker Harris created in his experiment.
In Harris’s experiment, all participants were constantly being surveilled and videotaped. They were being watched 24/7 from all corners of their life from eating, to sleeping, to even using the bathroom. Nothing was left out from the surveillance eye. For a month, the participants lived through this society, and many reached the point where they were no longer even noticing the cameras or realizing that they were being watched. Others were pushed over the brink mentally and emotionally.
Watching how the experiment turned out, especially with how disturbing and bizarre it was, taking a step back, we realize that this world he created in “Quiet” is in a sense the same world that we are living in today through social media. Decades later, information that we would typically keep very private have become public knowledge and even what we intend to keep private can end up being recorded online somehow. After witnessing Harris’s experiment, it’s disturbing to realize that we are basically living that same reality and knowing that at this point, there’s really nothing we can do to change it. Can we even go back to a time where we had private information? Can we live that life anymore?
Even when Harris lived in public with his at the time girlfriend, that’s very similar to how we share intimate romantic details of our life all over social media anymore — so much to the point where some feel like it’s being shoved down our throats and that if we don’t have the perfect relationship to display online, we are inadequate to others who do.
Watching this documentary really made me question and rethink my activity online. I know I have a lot of details of my life that are public knowledge that maybe I don’t necessarily want online anymore. But I can never go back and withdraw that information ever again. I can no longer live in private, just like Harris predicted.
