We Live in Public Reflection

This montage film told the story of the rise and fall of Josh Harris and his social experiments conducted in the late 90's/early 2000’s. One thing I noticed from this film is the style, the famous Soviet montage technique.

Montage Theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film’s ideological and intellectual power (Wikipedia).

The way information is presented in this film is in a non-linear way, with distracting visuals and corny animations. This made it hard to pay attention to what was being heard, and the visuals were flashed every couple of seconds as if it were someone with a short attention span, switching between devices or tabs on their laptop. Whether intentional or not, it made a connection to how current day technology is affecting us.

Another connection to current day is the platform Harris created in 1993, Pseudo.com. I immediately recognized the style of his platform, with a list of channels like cable television, and a chat room connected to each channel. Twitch, a streaming website for gamers, has the same layout, in addition to more enhanced features like subscribing and searching for specific users. Users that pay have more access and features than people who do not pay, including no ads.

Facebook also took a similar idea from Pseudo, by implementing Facebook Live. It acts similarly to the channel portion of Pseudo, where there are multiple “channels” (people) to watch. Each live video broadcasted has a live chat room, where people watching the streams can talk to the poster. However, Facebook took this idea and advanced it, but allowing Facebook live videos to be available for a short time even after being live. They also implemented in their code for comments written in the chat room to appear at the same time in the video that they were posted when the original video was being streamed. It’s “Interactive television,” just as Josh Harris coined Pseudo.com to be.

YouTube was originally created to be a replacement to television, also interactive with its comment section, yet it has failed to be that way. It has included pages for most major cable networking channels to post videos, instead of fighting against them. Google’s partnership with YouTube changed it, in the opinion of many, for the worse. It focuses now on the major content creators, the ones who get paid for making videos. This is an example of corporations caring more about profiting rather than the quality of their SNS.

Even Josh Harris commented in the film about how he enjoyed profiting from Pseudo while it was a huge success in the 90’s. Even from the beginning, owners have been caring less and less about their users, and more about the profit and worth of their website.

Founder Josh Harris claimed in 2008 that Pseudo was a “fake company” and “the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art” (Wikipedia).

Another comparison I made while watching the film is the one producers made, between the Capsule Hotel and Andy Warhol’s Factory. A point that was not made during the original comparison was that Warhol’s Factory consisted of workers that ended up doing most of his artwork, while Harris’ volunteers and their actions were why the Capsule Hotel was so famous. We credit Warhol for his successful artwork, although people that work for him deserve that credit. So why should we credit Josh Harris for the success of the Capsule Hotel, if it was his volunteers that made it so exciting to watch?

To enter the Capsule Hotel, it was said in the film that volunteers had to give up certain personal information to be a part of it. Including their full name, and social security number. They had to sacrifice their security in order to go public, just like users do when they join and log in to a current day social media site. Just like networking sites owning what you post, Josh Harris owned all the video recorded during his Capsule Hotel experiment.

In general, this film foreshadowed a lot of endings and policies surrounding current day social media. Some commentators in the film were right when they said these things would come true in the future, although not all of them have, (and I do not think they all will).