The dot com bubble that burst ten years ago feels like a distant memory - statistics of tens of millions of hits on various big name websites are regularly reported by the media. Even in today’s financial climate, the cyber universe looks set to continue in big bang fashion and weather the storm of the big crunch. Part of this strength is owed to online social networking, which is widely considered as the backbone of the Internet and soon to overtake email itself.
Current Social Media is catering for diverse audiences and their specific needs: a new social site, affluence.org, is a place for the super rich to network online. To join, you need to prove you have a cool £2million in the bank and an annual income of at least £214,000. With 22,000 members on affluence.org, it appears that the poor-rich divide has reached the web.
If you’re feeling academic about it all, you can now even take a Masters degree in the field of online social networking at the UK’s Birmingham City University. The new course will "explore the techniques of social media, consider the development and direction of social media as a creative industry, and will contribute new research and knowledge to the field” – so that might mean playing around on Facebook, Webjam and Twitter.
And now the story of Social Media has reached the film world.
Have you heard of Josh Harris? Many haven’t. The film documentary WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web has on our society through the eyes of the real life Internet entrepreneur, Josh Harris, who many have called the “[Andy] Warhol of the Web”.
Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner ("DIG!"), documented the tumultuous life of Josh Harris for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Josh Harris founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium.
The film synopsis explains the dystopian vision of Josh Harris: “[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 a 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.”
This intriguing film will no doubt receive more media (and Internet) coverage as it makes its current journey across film festivals in America.
