We Live in Public

Ten years in the making and culled from 5000 hours of footage, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC reveals the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”, artist, futurist and visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director Ondi Timoner (DIG! – which also won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2004 – making Timoner the only director to win that prestigious award twice) documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Timoner, explores questions that many in the social network community never pondered such as, is the Internet good or bad? How Facebook is bad? Why Facebook is bad? How the bad things about Facebook can ultimately harm you and your family? In addition to all the negative effects of the internet.

After watching the film the viewing audience started to question themselves and the negative effects of Internet use. A frequent user of social media stated, “I started to see why the Internet is bad, its only hazardous when it is overused. When I look at my friends and how much they use the web it makes me see that the internet is bad when there are no set boundaries. There is definitely a negative effect of Internet use and this film proves it.”

Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curetted and funded the ground-breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, we becomes more elusive. Harris, went on to say, “I hope this film sparks a conversational debate about social media as a whole. I want people to ask questions like, is Facebook bad for you? What is bad about Facebook use if not monitored? How is Facebook good or bad? and why is Facebook bad when not monitored? Not to pick on Facebook of course, but it is one of the leading social networks in the world. With this movie Harris hopes through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance, which led