It’s True, We Live in Public
Before the Internet was the monster it is now, there was one man who saw the potential of the Internet. He saw how the Internet would reshape our society into a culture based on promoting your personal life in public. This man was Josh Harris. He was a man before his time.
Harris exploited the possibilities of the Internet, showing the world the dangerous possibilities that lied in the future. Josh Harris rose to fame when he began his company, Pseudo.com, in the late ’90s. It was the first live-stream, Internet television network ever. Harris believed that Internet TV was the way of the future, and that one day it would beat out traditional TV networks. In the ’90s, people laughed him off. Today, it is almost impossible not to find TV on the Internet.
Delving further into theories of a future based on Internet technologies, Harris created the project “Quiet: We Live in Public”. It was an experiment that tested how people would react to having their private lives constantly on display for the public to see. As Harris stated, “Don’t bring your money with you, everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.” It was a month of people living in freedom all captured on tape. In the beginning it started off fun, people doing wild, crazy things to get attention and test the “rules”. However, by the end, everyone was left in distress and chaos. It exactly mimicked the present world we live in now with the Internet. Everything we post online is public. Even the information we think is private is public. And it has warped our society.
I think that is what is most disturbing about this documentary, We Live in Public. There are so many truths in it. The Internet has become about displaying your life online in order to gain attention — more commonly known today as ‘likes’. People will do wild, stupid, and sometimes life-risking stunts to get hits on YouTube with the hopes of landing a spot on a TV show. This idea seemed irrational when Harris created the idea for “Quiet”, but it hardly seems that way now. What is scary is that people have adjusted society to fit this trend, making it feel necessary to get as many likes on a picture, post, video, etc. as possible. The trend has become that the more personal the information, the more “likes” you will receive.
Think about what you post on Facebook. Think about how many of those posts reveal something about you as a person. Think how many times you have posted a major life event to social media. It’s crazy how much we share with people these days, most of whom we don’t even know that well.
Another scary aspect this documentary revealed is how the Internet breaks down social relationships. Having your life on public display makes people feel connected, but you are only connected virtually. As people in Harris’ experiment began to realize, even though they were constantly surrounded with people’s private lives, they didn’t really know them. They became upset, frustrated, and isolated because they could not escape the public setting. Those feelings exist today. Social media and the Internet gives us this feeling of popularity, but that is much different than actually having friends and personal connections. Eventually, these consequences take a toll on people. The Internet makes people addicted to losing themselves in a virtual world to escape the isolation of the physical world, which becomes a catch-22 situation: the more you insert yourself into the virtual world, the more isolated you become, thus the need to be in the virtual world grows.
There is this unsettling reality that the Internet has brought into this society. We have become numb to the invasion of privacy, so much that we willingly display ourselves on social media to gain attention. What originated as Harris’ futuristic, outlandish idea has now become reality. The question is, how many more of Harris’ predictions will become true? Is there a way to prevent total deconstruction of social values or is isolating ourselves from the world of the Internet our only hope?
We Live in Public Documentary:
