a man out of time
The documentary about Josh Harris — We Live In Public, begins with the following quote:
“the story of an internet pioneer, you have never heard of”
A pioneer? Never heard of? It seemed like a corny subtitle to this film, but by the time I finished watching We Live In Public, I was not only convinced but was shocked, intrigued, confused, and most importantly — uncomfortable.
I was not uncomfortable because of the strange and unnerving social experiments Josh did in his New York city ‘bunker’, but because of the surreal and uncanny similarities the outcome of ‘We Live In Public; the experiment’ and implications of the very public and social lives we live today. Josh might have given the world a glimpse of the future — a world encapsulated by social media, and how it’s changing not only the way we feel, but also the way we think. And he did that during a time when social media was brand new in the neighborhood.
The one scene really hit home for me. This was when Josh and his girlfriend have an argument for the first time in their very public lives. “When you love someone and have an argument, you want to listen to them and understand them”, his girlfriend explained, “but in this very public world we lived in, it became a competition — who is right, who is wrong, who is going to win the argument.
Social relationships are one of the most fundamental aspects of being a human being. We are social creature, we have relationships, and every now and then we disagree. However, our ability to understand each other has given us the power to work with our difference and maintain social harmony. Without getting too deep into human behavior and sociology, the key here is the realization that social media is changing this very basic functionality— not only in our digital lives, but IRL as well.
The wildly public lives depicted in Josh’s experiments serves as an extreme variation of foreshadowing the future of social media. The way participant’s relationship with each other changed with the new environment, the levels of anxiety and depression that was caused in the ‘bunker’, as well as the chaos that ensued toward the unplanned and forced end of the experiment.
Today, many of our social relationships are primarily on social media, or supplemented by it — totally changing the way we interact with each other and the larger society. Several studies have shown the link between higher levels of anxiety and depression among heavy social media users. And finally, with such high levels of fake information, we have experienced many extremist groups being enabled, organized, and orchestrated by the presence of social media.
What is important to note here is that social media is not the problem. Just like the experiments were putting participants in a simulated reality, we are today’s participants of this modern experiment. Our reality is being sugar-coated, exaggerated, altered, and reoriented to match our social media realities. This is influencing the behavior of the people to make some changes in their lives — technology is just the enabler.
