I saw a fascinating and thought-provoking documentary on one of the final days of the Sundance Film Festival. I had been getting Twitter feeds from Jason Calacanis through out the festival about his various exploits and had not been able to quite put two and two together about why he was at Sundance and was hanging out at parties at the Filmmaker's Lodge. The film, We Live In Public provided me with an explanation.
Jason is featured in the film. As a person who surrounded the visionary Josh Harris (of Jupiter Communications and Pseudo.com) he was one of several people interviewed to fill in the back story of Josh's rise and fall during the heyday of the dot com bubble. Josh parlayed the fortune he made with Jupiter (reportedly $80 million) into his next big thing, Psuedo.com which was basically internet TV before any of the rest of us had ever even thought of broadband.
Josh also considered himself an artist. He funded a project called "Quiet" which was a bunker hotel that housed 100 people in pods underneath the streets of New York just before the Millennium. Outfitted with hundreds of video surveillance cameras, the project was truly a Big Brother experiment. He invited 100 artists to participate and they wanted for nothing, but they were not allowed to leave. The resulting descent into madness, Josh claims, was all part of the plan as was the eventual shut down by FEMA.
What was most interesting for me about this film, truly, was how it made me think about the ways in which I currently live in public (and how we all do) with this blog and with Twitter and with Facebook. What that means to each of us. Individually and as a collective consciousness. What it says about us? If we choose to be so blatantly public (and we do) where there really are no rules for behavior and decorum (I am naked in your living room!!) then are we not also choosing to allow others to behave in whatever manner that they wish to behave in reaction to our behavior? Also, is our need to be noticed so great, so necessary, that we will literally get naked just to be noticed by strangers?
I get hundreds (sometimes thousands) of emails from people who are not happy with my naked body on the Internet. Yet, I continue to get naked. I continue to post my photos. Because it is who I am. It is what I do. It makes me happy. I believe that I am not forcing anyone to "visit" nakedjen.com. You can just as easily not look as you can look. Just as someone can just as easily choose not to read Scripting News or Pick Me or Daily Kos or any of the thousands of other blogs that are popping up every single day because someone somewhere has something they feel is important to say.
I do believe, strongly, that blogs (and the creation of them) has given all of us an equal platform on which to express our personal views, our personal voice. To allow all of us to speak out if we wish to do so. Blogs have connected us in ways that we previously were never able to truly connect on a global scale. I am forever grateful for that. Now, instead of just standing naked on the street corner in my small corner of the world shouting about body issues and fighting for dog parks, I can reach people all over the globe. I am changed forever for that platform! Truly and forever changed.
We Live In Public won the Grand Jury prize for Best US Documentary at Sundance this week. If you're reading this post, you're a very important part of its audience. Go see it if it comes to a theatre near you. And think about how your own life lives on the Internet.
