To help prepare for our conversation on rhetorics involving privacy in WLIP, please draft a response to the following questions. Try to integrate concepts from the textbook, where and when you can, but don't avoid a more free-ranging initial bit of text.
- Do you think you would ever have participated in such an experiment? If so, could you have imagined the extremes the film reveals?
- Where in the film is privacy explicitly discussed?
- Who talks about privacy? Is this a person/persons in power? What kind?
- Whose privacy is at stake? How are this person/person empowered or disempowered?
- Can you relate to either of these people/groups (see #2 and #3)? How? Why?
- Many people have described Josh Harris as "prescient," as a man capable of foreseeing the future. In what way? What did he foresee? How accurate was his vision?
- How does Harris' status at the end of the film speak to the matter of privacy as it's explored in the film?
- Find out (by whatever means) what Harris is up to now. The film, out in 2009, provides only that very dated information. What else can we learn?
- Does your discovery regarding Harris change your thinking about his "work"?
- What kinds of cultural work does WLIP do? That is, does is function as a "cautionary tale"? Or, is it more a straight documentary, director Ondi Timoner having found herself in a unique situation that she herself was later uniquely capable of sharing? (I have a short interview I taped with Ondi about 2 years ago -- we'll see some possible "answers" there. For now, speculate).
- What else does the film do? What other public rhetorics does it activate, tap, or alter? How?
No comments:
Post a Comment