Film Review of We Live in Public for Soc 1010

Personally, I was most attracted to the film’s music selection.  I have seen hundreds (possibly thousands) of documentaries.  In my experience, documentaries generally tell a story from a one-sided perspective, most of them have an agenda (i.e. make the primary character look good, incite anger against “injustices”, etc...) and most of them use music to appeal to the emotion of the audience.  It’s hard to deny that music can intensify or even create the emotion the filmmaker was looking for.  For example, most horror movies are much less suspenseful when on mute; it’s the music that creates an atmosphere of suspense.

We Live in Public used this technique of emotional appeal through music, but in a very choreographed way.  The music selected for the scenes were typically popular songs from the same era as the scene and also had the emotional appeal to compliment the content of the scenes.  This is a brilliant idea to appeal to the audience of the same era while encouraging emotion and at the same time setting a chronological frame of reference.

While music can strongly encourage an emotional connection this can also be a weakness.  To the conscientious observer, music can also expose the motives of the filmmaker.  Throughout the film, when Josh is speaking about himself or when someone is speaking about Josh, there is soft, ambient music in minor keys, which is generally used to incite sympathy or sadness.  In the opening scenes when the film is talking about people losing their identities and becoming a statistic, the music is eerie, strings driven, offset chords, which is generally used to encourage suspense and/or fear.

According to the music, the film was meant to sympathize with Josh Harris as a person and condemn the influence of the internet in our society.  In a way, it seems like an apologetic film as if we (the audience) should forgive Josh Harris for his foresight and contribution to the advancement of technological society.  It urges us to acknowledge the separation between Josh (the person) and the ever advancing internet (the monster).  It’s a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein.

Josh’s “social experiment”, Quiet, fell a bit short of the experimental standards.  Even Josh admitted that he didn’t know what to expect as a result of the experiment.  According to the Scientific Method, an experiment should have a theory, hypothesis, variables, data and an explanation of results.

Quiet had a theory, but that was about it (as far as we understand from this film).  There was no hypothesis, there were no variables, there was a lot of data, but no explanation of results.  From a scientific standpoint, Quiet comes off as more of an eccentric person’s personal party than a true experiment.

That personal party did have some revealing responses, however the responses were never explained and there was seemingly no sociological advancement or understanding as a result.

Quiet did have a very interesting insight on culture.  By creating this isolated group of people (some more exhibitive than others, but all probably had some sort of exhibitionism) Josh’s experiment showed how cultures and/or sub-cultures adapt.

The people in this experiment adapted to their conditions of no privacy and no identity.  While some people seemed to struggle with this more than others, it seemed the majority learned to adapt to the situation.

However, it was stated in the film, “If you ask someone to take off their pants, they won’t do it.  If you have a camera and ask someone to take off their pants, they probably will.”  This suggests that the idea of being watched (or “fame”) causes individuals to act in “unusual” behavior.

So perhaps Quiet was an experiment to see if a culture’s “unusual” behavior can or will adapt and become usual and at what pace.