"We Live in Public" is a amazing documentary directed by Ondi Timoner that follows Josh Harris, a revolutionary artist through his days of his conceptual art. Josh Harris was one of the pioneers of online interacting with his website Pseudo.com. Josh had an idea of where this social interacting over the internet was going, and he had wanted to show everyone. Josh then created his project "We Live in Public" to describe the upcoming ways of life that he saw. For this project, Josh had put about 100 people in a few rooms and bunk beds for a whole month, without being able to get out. While these people were in these rooms, there were always cameras on them, allowing no privacy to anybody. The point that Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris were trying to convey was that we are heading into a world where we will always be seen and we are not able to stop it. The project "We Live in Public" ended up really showing and describing the type of world we are heading into with cameras almost everywhere and having no privacy and worked with the point of the film. Josh moved onto another "We Live in Public" project with his girlfriend in his own house later, which did not end well. The film was chronological, seeing as Ondi Timoner had followed around Josh Harris and had organized the film to show what Josh was doing over time.
This film was an expository documentary, yet showed some points of an observational documentary. The reason for it being an expository documentary were for a few reasons. One reason was that there was a "voice of god" coming from Ondi Timoner throughout the film to help the viewer better understand what was going on. The film tried to persuade the viewer into believing that this is the kind of life that they will live in, with no privacy and always being watched. There was also some archival footage in the documentary. For example, when the documentary showed newscasts of Pseudo. The documentary was observational in some ways to. One aspect that the documentary showed that gave it this part observational documentary was that the camera acts as a bystander at points. For example. the camera acts as a bystander when filming the first "We Live in Public" project. The perspective of the film was a bit biased because they never had any opinions from somebody other than people related to the "We Live in Public" project.
Overall, I believed that this film was great. One of the strengths that made this film amazing was that Ondi Timoner was able to make the viewer feel for Josh Harris. When Josh was mad, sad, or happy, the viewer also felt this way. One other strength of the film was that Ondi Timoner had the skills to film this documentary very well and was able to put in the parts of the film that would keep people interested and wanting to know more about Josh's ideas. One scene that I found effective in this film was when Josh and his girlfriend were living in the house together with the cameras always watching. It gave people a sense of how Josh would see the future, with no privacy and always being watched. One other scene that was effective was the montages of the life inside Josh's project "We Live in Public".
A film like "We Live in Public" has great value in our culture today. It outright tells us what type of world we are living in and where the world is headed. With a film like this, it does have some positive and negative outcomes. A positive outcome is that people will realize that where the world is headed with privacy and will be aware of it. A negative outcome of this film is that people would probably not feel too comfortable with where their privacy is headed, and they now know that they are not able to change it. This film does make a statement because it shows us what will happen with privacy and that people better be alright with it, because it will most likely not change.
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