technoculture203-09

The recent lecture on Privacy in the Digital age got me thinking about the society we live in. We are living in a more commercial and a less privatized society, which is why the concept of surveillance is so interesting. In everyday life we are able to be tracked and surveyed pretty much everywhere we go, for example CCTV visually tracks images of society.

Surveillance can also be assumed through Facebook, whose privacy status is controlled by users. I have seen people who I know used for advertising, this makes me question if I have the right settings on my account. Facebook's public settings are becoming an issue as employers can survey their possible employees’ profile.

Recently TV show Dr Phil produced an interesting example of the total violation of privacy, through the issue of ‘Sexting’. This concept involves the sending of naked or sexual pictures, messaged via mobile phones. Dr Phil counselled a victim of Sexting, who took an image of herself, sent it to a boy that she liked, which he then sent to his friends. This example proves that mobile phones are a main form of technological convergence as they include a camera, and are becoming more than primarily a form of communication. In the 21st century we are living life in the public eye, we are continually surveyed.

I've just come back from seeing We Live in Public at the NZ International Film Festival. Besides being by far the best film I've seen at the festival this year, it uniquely charts the social and cultural significance of the Internet in our lives over the past decade by focusing on the life of one individual.

Here's the synopsis:

On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), 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.

Josh 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 created his vision of the future: an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the turn of the millennium. (The project, named QUIET, also became the subject of Ondi Timoner’s first cut of her documentary about Harris. Her film shared the project’s name.) With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.

For me it raised far more questions than I have answers and I've found doing a fair bit of future gazing and looking very closely in the rear view mirror. Reflecting on the future that theorists and media/technology commentators predicted a decade ago, many of those visions have been realised, just not always quite in the fully utopian or distopian ways that were predicted. Personally I think the development of the technology itself feels quite slow relative to our adoption of it, which I do find slightly disquieting.

If anyone else has seen the film I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If you haven't seen it I'm fairly sure it will get a general release here soon.