“Pseudo” Celebrities and Modern Social Media
As a fairly private person, watching the 2009 documentary We Live in Public was jarring. I can’t even imagine being so willing to give up my privacy in the ways the individuals who took place in the “Quiet: We Live in Public” and “We Live in Public” experiments did. Today, we have a desire to share information about ourselves, but all of that is voluntary. It isn’t voluntary in the way the “We Live in Public” projects were, though. In the case of “Quiet,” the participants voluntarily signed up. They wanted to be a part of it but did not realize how out of hand it had the possibility of becoming. I think this says a lot about how aware we are about the dangers of social media today. We recognize that there are boundaries on social media, and how things could go wrong if we cross those boundaries of privacy.
Another thing I found interesting about “Quiet” was how it was aimed at the artistic communities of 1990s New York City. Once it failed, Josh Harris, the creator and mastermind behind it, claimed that it was an art project, and nothing more. Harris made an attempt at being an artist using the medium he was most familiar with: technology. He had been doing something innovative for years and continued that trend with “Quiet.” Overall, the experiment gave a look into what drove the artistic community of the 1990s in NYC, and how it operated, just by people involved discussing the motivations for joining.
At the core of the technology-based drive of this community at this time was the group of individuals known as the Dot-Com Kids. One of these Dot-Com Kids was Josh Harris. Before “Quiet,” he created Pseudo, a platform for streaming live video alongside a chat feature, in the early 1990s. Pseudo was set up to be a global television station, with multiple on-air shows in which viewers could interact with the hosts. Harris assembled a group of young, diverse creatives to make content. This led me to think about our current social media climate, and influencer culture. In a way, I guess the Dot-Com Kids and those working at Pseudo were early incarnations of the modern “influencer.” Today, there are definitely subgenres of “influencers,” based on the type of content one creates. Shows on Pseudo were catered to certain audiences, and therefore those hosts could be categorized as influencers. Pseudo even held parties like influencers today have done. Today’s influencers start posting what they want to, and then eventually begin to get paid to do so once they reach a large audience, therefore gaining influence. Pseudo was allowing creatives a space to explore and get paid at the same time, and the audience was the reward.
The audience and the view count being the reward was what drove Josh Harris to start his “We Live in Public” experiment. The experiment was simple: livestream his entire life (along with his girlfriend, Tanya’s) and never turn the camera off. When it began, they thrived off views, and interactions with those watching. But once those fell, the project did too. He began to have relationship problems, finance problems, and the situation he had put himself in was becoming too toxic to handle. Tanya left, he eventually stopped streaming and recording his life, and when it was all over, said the relationship was fake, as if to say the entire thing was a set-up and not an experiment in which he was a test subject.
This sort of publicized rise-and-fall relationship situation seems common nowadays, especially when influencers and content creators are in relationships with each other. They are in the public eye, and their content is often being taken in by millions of people on the daily. So, when things begin to go awry, there are questions and recommendations from viewers, and an extra layer of stress is added onto what is already a distressing situation. Not only did Josh Harris create the first influencers, but he also experienced the root causes of many of today’s influencer couples’ downfalls. He was a predecessor in almost every way.
Another interesting thing I found interesting was the discussion about the reach these projects and companies had, and how that was solely due to them using the internet. In the documentary, Fred Wilson states that he knew the internet was going to become the replacement for radio and television. As we know, this has proved true. With the rise of streaming platforms for both music and film/TV, the online world is slowly replacing them, as always, with faster means of transmission. Josh Harris claimed that Pseudo was going to take out CBS in its heyday, but this claim came with the assumption that the network, and those similar to it, were not going to adapt. However, many television networks have created mobile apps and streaming platforms of their own as our use of technology has evolved.
A lot of the thoughts Josh Harris formed the “We Live in Public” experiments around is relevant to our current use of social media: constant video streams, video calls, interactions with individuals who you wouldn’t have a connection with otherwise. But social media has evolved from what Pseudo and Josh created and will continue to evolve, much like network television adapting. The social media we know right now will not always be the one we are interacting with. It will be interesting to learn what unknown precedents we are setting right now.
