Blog #3 — We Live in Public: Reflection
As I reflected on the documentary “We Live in Public” I thought it was a super interesting experiment into the exploration of human behavior in the new digital age. I found myself drawn to its strange parallels with things you see on social media today. The film goes into the life and experiments of internet figure Josh Harris, showing a glimpse into the consequences of living in a hyper-connected society where privacy disappears and everyone can access content.
Harris’s social experiments anticipated the rise of social media and its crucial impact on human interaction through video. Through his experiments like a 24/7 surveillance of participants’ lives, and a communal living experiment constantly getting watched by the public, Harris foreshadowed how social media would destroy anything we knew as private in our lives. I saw his experiments almost as a warning, highlighting the potential dangers of giving up your life for content and validation.
Watching the documentary instantly gave me the connection to a platform like Twitch, where creators spend hours online either playing video games or just in front of a camera going about their day. More recently, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook added a live feature where followers can join and immediately see what you’re up to. Platforms like those have transformed how we live our lives, and how anyone can exploit their privacy to get likes, comments, and shares. It’s so strange seeing what being under constant surveillance can do to people. A popular trend on TikTok recently has turned people into robots only making noises and movements when people donate money. I personally think that trend is absurd and the fact people even give money to creators doing that only promotes this chronically online behavior.
Similarly in the documentary, Josh launched his first experiment. He gathered 100 people and put them into a basement at no charge. They had access to food, water, alcohol, other people, and a place to sleep. The only condition was they had to be filmed all the time, every day. At first, the concept doesn’t sound completely terrible. I’m sure a lot of these people in their early 20s were struggling in New York and they jumped at the chance to maybe make a name for themselves. This is exactly what happens now on shows like Love Island where people are dropped onto an island with no connection to the outside world and forced to interact. These people can become famous because of all these random people tuning in to see what happens. In Josh’s case, however, everything went horrible shortly thereafter. I found a lot of this part of the documentary disturbing and creepy because you could see these people were brainwashed. People would do outlandish things knowing people were watching.
We think this is such an insane concept, but this also made me think of the media today with family vloggers who document their lives for attention. They flaunt their newborn kids for thousands of people to see and no one is going to argue that because the kids can’t even stand up for themselves. This goes along with the second experiment Josh did where he convinced his wife to fully livestream their lives in their house. Just like in reality TV, when people know the camera is on them, they want to stand out and create content. This led to arguments between the couple which ultimately got his wife Tanya to leave him. Again, this seems so crazy until you look at social media now where people are constantly documenting their every move. There are vlogs of people at the grocery store, at Disneyland, and going to the post office. These people share every aspect of their lives because they know people will watch it.
In conclusion, I just thought it was so interesting how Josh Harris predicted the future of content creation. These experiments and websites were created in the 90s, years before social media and streaming apps like YouTube came along. The fact that filming yourself doing daily activities became a career is just wild to me. Overall, “We Live in Public” was an exploration of the possibilities of digital media. It only scratched the surface of what people do years later. It made me think about how much social media really controls our lives rather than connects us. Social media used to be the place for sharing ideas and images and connecting with people you don’t see every day. Now, the idea of social media has become an area curating likes, attention, and trends people now obsess over. I think this documentary can be a huge learning moment as we continue to navigate a constantly changing landscape of social media. I’m interested in the future just to see how much social media gets integrated into our lives, or if there’s ever a point where we choose to reject it and work towards a more humane society.
