We All Live in Public
Danny Cohen, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg, and Josh Harris? What do these people have in common? Although you may not know a few of these internet pioneers, you definitely don’t know Josh Harris. He was undoubtedly a “one of a kind” human being. From being ahead of the curve in nearly every technology trend to his wacky lifestyles and motives, he was often criticized by many. This man with a few crazy ideas quietly led himself to become the greatest internet pioneer that no one had ever heard of.
Having expectations of what would come of the Internet in the mid-1980s, Harris created Jupiter Communications. The company, along with others founded by the “dot-com kids”, went on to make a huge mark in the industry. Shortly after, he founded pseudo.com in efforts to revolutionize internet streaming. The millions that he made changing the way we interact went straight into his projects and experiments. His experiment “We Live in Public” was something that had never been done before. This large scale version of “Big Brother” had many rules and regulations. People that came in off the streets to reside in the Japanese-style capsule hotel practically signed their life away. Josh explained it well, stating that “everything is free, except the video we capture of you, that we own.” Whether you were sleeping, eating, or even having sex, you were always being filmed.
The people that signed for this project weren’t the most level-headed people in the world, but no one could have expected what Josh Harris did. The people living inside developed a culture. They started off getting to know each other, while worrying what people on the outside would see. Eventually their outside views got rolled into one. People stopped caring that they were being filmed. Many individuals would walk around naked and have sex in public without hesitation. Their private image became their public image. They became detached from themselves.
Eventually the residents got accustomed to being served hand and foot. It became a habit for them to pound their fists on the table as they awaited their meal, and there was no societal pressure to do anything else. After a few weeks of exploration and partying in this “underground cult”, it began to get real. Fights started to break out and emotions became uncontrolled. When Y2K rolled around, the project was shut down by the police. At this point, Josh had already proved his point about how the culture would change and he was tired of caring for all of these people. It also didn’t help that he was way over budget on the project, either.
He eventually moved on another project, where he and his girlfriend put cameras in every location within their house in efforts to “live in public”. This was Harris’s attempt at how two people (instead of hundreds) would do with this pressure. He predicted that in the future, we would all put our lives on camera and invite everyone in to watch. This is ridiculously true now. Last week, we looked at YouTube as a platform and saw just how much social capital that these “internet celebrities” have. Some bigger stars practically never leave the spotlight. People like YouTuber Roman Atwood, treat the platform as a full-time job. Atwood, a husband and father of two started out as a prankster recording just on the weekends. Now that the market for pranks got well over-saturated with fake pranks and set-ups, Atwood does vlogging full-time. With over 11 million subscribers, Atwood’s day consists of filming the adventures that he and his family have. Whether it’s an eventful or a boring day, he spends hours recording, editing, and sometimes scripting his life.
So what would happen if Atwood and his wife decide to file for divorce or the kids get in trouble at school? Would we all immediately know? Yeah, probably. Atwood doesn’t need to post a video or send a tweet; but rather not posting at all would imply that something is wrong. Just as Harris found out, the reality of living in public is very invasive. It will be very interesting to see just what vloggers will do when faced with problems like these. I predict that this will eventually cause many people to leave the platform in attempts to get their life back. With the attention that some of these channels receive, just one moment or slip up could completely change someone’s life in a very negative way.
Josh Harris was definitely correct when he stated that we would always be connected and offer people insight to our lives. Regardless of the platform, most of us have some sort of social media outlet that we post to occasionally for other people to follow what we do. His experiments allow us to understand the dynamic of people when faced with situations like this, at a much larger scale than just posting daily. So is anyone truly brave and confident enough to do what Harris established by living in public?
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RomanAtwoodVlogs/ — RomanAtwood’s YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LexyO9RMzs — We Live in Public Documentary
