Filmmakers, Take Advantage of the New Virtual World!

I first embarked on making my film, "We Live in Public," a little over 10 years ago. It was another era in 1999: a time when modems made ’80s synth screeches, many thought the internet was a passing fad and many major companies didn’t even have the most basic of websites.   

When I began documenting the social experiments of “Warhol of the Web," Internet bad boy, Josh Harris, I only knew I was documenting an eccentric innovator who spent his money in extraordinary ways — building bunkers instead of buying house and cars like most millionaires. Certainly the voyeur’s paradise that Josh created in boom-era, late-’90s NYC made for some colorful footage, but it took many years before I realized the greater significance of Josh’s work.  

I didn’t know if he was a buffoon or a visionary, an artist or a businessman trying to buy his way into the art world. And I certainly didn’t know how the cyber-bunker he built in lower Manhattan that ran for nearly 30 days over the Millenium, related to all of us in our lives, as it took years for society and technology to catch up to Josh’s vision of how our lives online would play out.

Very early on, Josh predicted that it would take over our lives and was driven to lay out several scenarios exploring what would happen as we lived as a society, and even in our most intimate relationships, in public. Indeed, the Internet has become such an integral part of our existence that it is almost impossible to imagine how we could function professionally, socially or perhaps for some of us, emotionally, without it.

The Internet gives us a new 24/7 way to satisfy the desire we all have as humans to connect, to avoid feeling we are alone, and further — to feel our lives matter in some way, that we are leaving a mark.

Just as people streamed into the bunker, answering 500 personal questions, and trading their privacy and eventually their freedom to be where it mattered, we accept terms and conditions online without reading them and increasingly reveal our personal lives for the feedback we are sure to receive through this new magic medium! 

When I saw first saw a trivial Facebook status update, “I’m driving west on the freeway” in late 2007, I realized that this movie had to come out as fast as possible. 

It is a crucial tipping point where the virtual world is now trumping the physical world, and it is affecting our identity and relationships in many ways. And as we connect out, through time and space, 50 times more daily than we did even last year, we are disconnecting 50 percent more from our physical lives to keep up this far more superficial communication. 

That’s only one of the potential pitfalls of this undeniable evolutionary process.