Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who goes online should watch WE LIVE IN PUBLIC.

Here's a link to this site and the documentary is available on stream from NETFLIX

The film details the experiences of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of,"^[1] Josh Harris. The dot.com millionaire founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous tech boom of the late '90s. After achieving prominence amongst the Silicon Valley set, Harris became interested in controversial human experiments which tested the effects of media and technology on the development of personal identity. Ondi Timoner documented the major business-related moments of Harris's life for more than a decade, setting the tone for her documentary of the virtual world and its supposed control of human lives.^[1]

Among Harris' experiments touched on in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother type concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made.^[2] The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods^[3] installed in the basement by artist Jeff Gompertz.^[4]

The film's website describes how, "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."

"He climbs into the TV set and he becomes the rat in his own experiment at this point, and the results don't turn out very well for him^[5]," says Timoner of the six month period Harris broadcast his life in his NYC loft live online. "He really takes the only relationship that he's ever had that was close and intimate and beaches it on 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 invasive microphones. I mean his girlfriend who signed on to it thinking it would be fun and cool, and that they were living a fast and crazy Internet life, she ended up leaving him. She just couldn't be intimate in public. And I think that's an important lesson; the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it."

(from Wiki)

Geert Lovink: 10.25.10 Guest Speaker

I'm pretty excited about the speaker tonight, he's written a number of books that extrapolate on different aspects of the internet and networking. These are his books:

Zero Comments — Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Routledge, 2007) In Zero Comments Geert Lovink upgrades worn-out concepts and inquires the latest Web 2.0 hype around blogs, wikis and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, Lovink develops a ‘general theory of blogging.

Uncanny Networks — Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (MIT Press, 2002), a collection of interviews with new media artists, theorists and critics from East and West-Europe, USA and Asia who reflect on their concepts and practices. It provides a critical context of ideas, networks and artworks that have shaped the past decade.

My First Recession — Critical Internet Culture in Transition (V2-NAi, 2003, translated in Italian), contains essays on Internet theory, dotcom literature, the issue of moderation, lists, blogs and open publishing and case studies of three list communities: Syndicate (Deep Europe), Xchange (streaming media) and Oekonux (GPL society debate).

The Principle of Notworking — Concepts in Critical Internet Culture (AUP, 2005), inaugural speech at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, february 2005, with three chapters on multitude, network and culture, the theory of free cooperation and the dawn of the organized networks. This booklet can be download here as a pdf (2.2 MB).

Dark Fiber – Tracking Critical Internet Culture (MIT Press, 2002, translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Japanese) brings together texts about new media culture worldwide, with essays on The Digital City Amsterdam and nettime, data dandyism, tactical media strategies and early critiques of dotcommania.

I'll be purchasing Zero Comments and Dark Fiber

You can also check out his blog: net critique