Apr 07 2009 LINK
“ The Internet’s like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s gonna like it. But, there will be a fundamental change in the human condition. One day we’re all gonna wake up and realize that we’re just servants. It’s captured us.
—

Josh Harris in Ondi Timoner’s Sundance winning documentary We Live in Public.

My mouth hung agape for the entirety of this screening.

Of course the surface level storytelling — extreme oversharing and isolation leading to aggressive hedonism and finally imploding in chaos — was somewhat predictable, but its timely incrimination of our current social media culture is still admittedly shocking. This. Might. Happen. To. Us. Lifestreaming faces much more serious issues than monetization, heh. In embracing it, we’re teetering on the edge of a sort of social sharing and performance insanity.

Or so the film suggests. We’ll by no means meet this chaotic end that Josh Harris depicts in his voyeuristic, totalitarian human installations. His experiments are grand exaggerations. Instead, it’s likely that we’ll evolve to both share more and censor more adeptly. We’re in a process of experimentation and adaptation right now. Constantly learning, sharing, making mistakes, and figuring out the proper rate at which to distribute digital pieces of ourselves to strangers. Our digital self portraits are early studies yet. I doubt we’ll be cutting our ears off anytime soon.

***

So there’s the main theme. I found myself wondering a lot of other things throughout the film, though.

Like, why are startups with webcasting and realtime chatting seen as so provocative today when experiments like Harris’ laid them out a decade ago? We seem newly impressed by the same old things. Our collective memories are so generational, so short. Especially when it comes to web startups!

The web is a unique place for innovation in that its sandbox and toolset remain mostly unchanged. The technical architecture of the web has changed very little (it’s mostly just gotten faster and better connected without substantive change of state) so that new ideas constantly require innovations in concept rather than technology/delivery/assembly. Theoretically there should be an infinite number of permutations and combinations of ‘information ideas’ to create new businesses with, but are we armed with enough cognitive power to keep creating them? You start to get the feeling that so many startups are pushing the same pixels around and hatching clever names for old arrangements. Stale. It’s why I stopped reading TechCrunch for awhile, in fact. But I think we’re on our way out of that rut.

There was no mention of the archival dangers of lifestreaming. Like how posting videos of yourself will cost you a job later. And I’m glad. I think that is one of the most important things that our always-on culture will change. For three reasons: 1) The sheer volume of information increases exponentially with every day such that actually surfacing incriminating information from a hefty stack of digital records will be too difficult 2) The emphasis will continue to shift away from archival content and toward current, real time content such that past online activity will be less easy to access by design 2) The existence of such incriminating evidence for everyone online will serve to normalize it. Holding people to higher standards than we hold ourselves will seem pointless and rude. Launching everything, the better and the worse, into the public sphere serves to make us all more human and acceptable.