We Live in Public

A documentary about a man who indeed did foresee and pave the way for what was yet to come. In a lot of ways his projects were kind of like The Real World meets the Internet meets Big Brother.

You can find a documentary about nearly everything. That certainly doesn't mean a documentary is necessary regardless of how interesting the person place or thing might seem to be.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC charts the career of a man who not only embraced, embodied, and celebrated the World Wide Web practically from its inception, but was able to guess certain directions that this phenomenon would take. However, the premise of the film is that Josh Harris is a genius because he was able to develop internet social networking years before anyone else, and I find this to be a kind of false assumption.

There can be few more tedious groups of people than dot-com entrepreneurs and performance artists: Josh Harris was one of the former who thought himself one of the latter; and in this documentary of his life, he reveals himself to be every bit as self-regarding as you might expect him to be. That he has a collection of groupies willing to assert his utter brilliance is even more annoying.

In the 1980s, Josh Harris had seen the computer/electronic age bud with the Commodore computer keyboard, the IBM chip, dot-matrix printers, large VDT screens, and of course, 8-track tapes and hi-fi stereo systems like Zenith's Allegro and a defunct brand, Electrophonic, that were about to be dead. Reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes and its boom boxes, and filmstrips, Kodachrome, the Polaroid camera, and the traditional video projector were also popular then.

What a documentary. I was first in line for ticket holders to the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary showing at the Library Center Theatre, not knowing which film would win the award until the crowd was seated.