Digital Performance in Everyday Life

Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, Ariel Gratch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429801327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Digital Performance in Everyday Life combines theories of performance, communication, and media to explore the many ways we perform in our everyday lives through digital media and in virtual spaces.

Digital communication technologies and the social norms and discourses that developed alongside these technologies have altered the ways we perform as and for ourselves and each other in virtual spaces. Through a diverse range of topics and examples—including discussions of self-identity, surveillance, mourning, internet memes, storytelling, ritual, political action, and activism—this book addresses how the physical and virtual have become inseparable in everyday life, and how the digital is always rooted in embodied action. Focusing on performance and human agency, the authors offer fresh perspectives on communication and digital culture.

The unique, interdisciplinary approach of this book will be useful to scholars, artists, and activists in communication, digital media, performance studies, theatre, sociology, political science, information technology, and cybersecurity—along with anyone interested in how communication shapes and is shaped by digital technologies.

1 Introduction to digital performance in everyday life

DOI: 10.4324/9780429439872-1

Imagine yourself sitting with someone you’ve just recently met, face-to-face in the same time and space. They tell you about a tragedy they experienced earlier in the week, which has affected them deeply. You watch as they hold back tears so they might speak to you coherently. Their voice trembles, and they emit a heavy sigh. Would you feel for them, through empathy, sympathy, or sadness? Would you, perhaps, think about similar experiences which have caused suffering in your life or the life of a loved one? Would you want to help or comfort them?

Imagine now that this person lives 3,000 miles away, and you met them online rather than where you live. Instead of joining you in physical space, they call you over FaceTime. They speak of the exact same tragedy in the exact same way. You see the tears forming, and you hear the trembling voice and sigh. While you can’t offer a hug, you can surely offer comfort.

Now place this communication of tragedy onto a theatrical stage, and into the body of a performer who just happens to look a whole lot like the hypothetical someone described above. You are in the front row, ten feet away from what is essentially an identical performance of suffering: the tears, the tremble, the sigh, and all. Aside from the simple existence of the stage and the performer, nothing at all about the communication of tragedy has changed.

But have you?

Performance, Mediation, and Communication

One of the earliest critiques of theatrical performance was that it mediated reality. While the idea of mediation posed no problems, per se, the notion of performance was disparaged at length as the art of liars: false, untrustworthy, and manipulative. The problem stemmed from the fact that, as long as theatrical performances have existed, they have had a tendency to evoke real emotional responses among audience members. If something is not real but evokes real feelings, the critique goes, it should not be trusted. This belief is the seed that grew and mutated into the many forms of antitheatrical prejudice that exist in contemporary society. Real is good. Fake is bad. And if we find out something we thought was real is actually fake—what does that make us?

Meanwhile, as history trundled on, new forms of mediated communication were also developed. With each of these came (the same, old) new critiques of mediation. The most common thread throughout these critiques has been that new media, be it the telegraph or augmented reality, fundamentally change human communication, and for what we gain in speed or convenience we lose in meaning or “authentic” interpersonal connection. At the heart of these critiques—that mediated communication is either not as real as or somehow less than unmediated communication—is the belief that if we just spoke face-to-face (which is the type of communication that most would call “unmediated”), many of our communication-based problems could be solved. If we could simply engage directly with reality instead of letting it come to us through mediated channels, we would certainly find a much simpler way of communicating our thoughts, ideas, and feelings with each other.

Our goal is not to get bogged down in questions of what is or is not real, or if one mode of communication is inherently better or worse than another. Rather, we want to acknowledge that the changes that new forms of meditation have always brought into our everyday lives often make our communication (and thus our life) seem more complex. Yet, just as theatrical performances can provide a window into human experience that we may otherwise not have access to, other forms of mediated communication can help us see and encounter reality in more diverse ways. Additionally, while new forms of mediated communication might seem to make life more complicated, this is more often a result of confusion about how to use the technology—the receivers, speakers, boxes, buttons, screens, and headsets—rather than the meditation itself, which is simply the interface that allows one person to communicate with (one or many) others—through writing, photography, audio, video, and other means. Increased physical distance, extended time between communication and response, the ability to communicate with large numbers of people simultaneously, or even the fact that we can often see (rather than just hear) those we communicate with in synchronous time, might make our communication behaviors and habits different. However, most of the time these changes to our everyday interpersonal interactions don’t add complexity that was not already there; they simply reveal it.

In most contexts, performance is not considered mediated communication. Someone might be performing on television or in a movie, but with the exception of some performance studies scholars and a few others, these performances are generally seen as “captured” by digital technologies, and then mediated for others to watch. Even media studies scholars who use performance theory reveal—through subtleties in the ways they speak or write about “performance”—that beneath any theoretical lingo and object analysis, many generally still consider performance to be synonymous with “faking” or “acting” (i.e., in the theatrical sense). Performance, as such, is an “act,” something that is not real, and thus something a person must do before the performance can be mediated. This way of thinking and writing about performance also suggests that performance is something that, at some point, must end. However, as we will address throughout this book, while someone may stop doing some action or act, this does not mean that the performance is finished. “Performance” is not merely another theoretical monocle through which scholars might view and interpret human action. Rather, in this book, we start from the premise that performance is a key component of all human communication. Most human behavior relies on performance. Further, performance is a form of mediation, not in the theatrical sense, but in the sense that all performances begin with a human body doing something. This human body (inclusive of voice, movement, dress, adornment, and all of the other ways the body may be socioculturally marked) is the medium between the thought or idea the person has about doing something (i.e., “motive” or motivation) and the actual doing of the thing (i.e., “action”).

This is not to say that we want to focus on the notion that “everything is a performance,” which can render the term essentially useless. Instead, we frame performance as a means of both recognizing and using the aesthetic qualities of communication in our everyday life interactions. This recognition may, perhaps, lead one to rehearse or plan communication before it happens. Yet this does not make the communication any less valid or real. Indeed: Let those who have never practiced a smile in the mirror, tried on multiple outfits before deciding what to wear for the day, or imagined how to best communicate their anger, disgust, joy, sadness, or fear with another person before actually doing it throw the first stone/tomato. (Additionally, please let those who have never done these things have the opportunity to read this book in full.)

Performance is also an everyday phenomenon that allows acts of communication and communicative behaviors to leave traces of themselves behind—traces that are found, picked up, and used again by the same person or others. When these communicative acts/actions happen through the use of digital technology, we call it digital performance (i.e., everyday performances that rely on digital technologies).¹ Throughout this book we apply performance theory to multiple forms of digitally mediated communication to clarify the similarities and differences between face-to-face performances of communication and digital performances of communication. Meanwhile, though mediation can affect our communication, it is not separate from our communication. As Sarah Bay-Cheng et al. argue, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of communication that is purely mediated or purely material (50). What happens before, during, and after digital mediation is part of what it means to communicate. Further, what links each moment of communication within processes of mediation can be better understood through performance theory. Simply put, while we can try to distinguish discrete “online” and “offline” spaces, our everyday life performances blur the boundaries between the two, simultaneously situating us in both modalities. Those of us who use computers, smartphones, social media, and/or the internet have an ongoing online presence, and this presence can’t be detached from the other parts of our life. Thus, nothing can ever really be qualified as irl (in real life) because all communication, regardless of modality, is always already happening in real life. The acronym “irl” has become both inaccurate and irrelevant.

Throughout this book we also contend that a person who engages with digital and online communication technologies can never truly be “offline,” and advances in digital technologies and the sociocultural shifts and trends that accompany these have altered the ways we perform as and for ourselves and others in myriad contexts. Negotiating how we perform in and between online and offline spaces is a skill that individuals will increasingly need to learn, and researchers interested in communication and performance will need to lean into this. To that end, there are terms we use throughout the book to highlight the differences between how we talk about the virtual, the digital, and the physical. Our use of this terminology is meant to be practical. Despite the ubiquity of digital technologies, in the grand scheme of things, digital communication (and thus everyday life digital performance) is a relatively new phenomenon. While the usage of some of the key terms here will likely change over time, we use them in a consistent manner throughout this book.

Key Terms: Virtual, Digital, Social Media, and Social Networking

We use the term virtual in this book in contrast to physical space, when referencing spaces where our communication is mediated by digital technologies. Through our use of the term virtual to refer to a type of space, we are stepping away from more traditional notions of liveness as it pertains to our ephemeral (i.e., disappearing) communication in physical space. Marcyrose Chvasta explains that “while the [physical] is present oriented, in the temporal and spatial sense of the term, the virtual is future oriented … The virtual is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there.’ It is the in-between” (165). While virtual space is distinct from physical space, neither is more or less “live” than the other. Additionally, conceptualizing performers and performance in virtual space is not about trying to understand some sort of theoretical upheaval. Traditional performance theories are still applicable in virtual spaces, and at least a few performance studies scholars have wholly embraced this. Studying performance today is thus about learning the constraints and possibilities that virtual spaces and digital technologies offer that are different from the constraints and possibilities of physical spaces. For example, in virtual space we might pay more attention to audience(s) and their reception of our performances than we would in physical space. Indeed, while a performance might happen once in physical space and then disappear, it can happen in virtual space again, and again, and again. And then again some more. Using the term virtual to describe performance and performers in relation to space also takes the focus away from the technologies used by the performers and instead focuses on how they use such technologies and the effects of this use.

Virtual calls to mind ideas and issues that have been key tenets of the field of performance studies since its inception. Virtual implies the “not not me” (Schechner 112), for instance: an identity that is both present and absent, an identity that is formed in the in-between space of me (who I think I am) and not me (who I think I am not) and must embrace the effects of others accessing this space (i.e., who I think you think I am). Virtual also implies a space of play that is both rule-governed and creates its own rules (Huizinga 3). Finally, virtual implies the social construction of reality through performativity—a type of performance and/or space that is artificially constructed/practiced, yet nevertheless holds real everyday life consequences. Our use of virtual includes performers (i.e., people) who use digital technologies and take for granted that the aforementioned paradoxes are core aspects of the very performances and spaces they construct every day. It is assumed, through the term virtual, that such performers and performances are best discussed for what they can teach us about human activity and action, and not about the digital technologies they use. As Chvasta states, “The essence of performance is virtual—[physical] and not-[physical], possible and actual” (167).

We use the term digital, meanwhile, to refer to the technologies (programs, devices, platforms, applications) that make virtual performances possible and that serve as our connection between physical and virtual space. Digital is in the title of this book, whereas virtual is not, because digital technology makes virtual space possible, and through our uses of virtual space we continue to (re)create the digital. As we hope will become increasingly clear in subsequent chapters, we do not fully buy into Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message,” i.e., that “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9). While a particular medium can, and sometimes will, shape and control the actions that come from its use and even the meanings of that action, it will not necessarily do so. Performance practitioners have long and idiosyncratic histories of making their media of choice do a wide array of things the media was never intended to do. Social networking site users do the same (though perhaps on a smaller scale, for now) through how they use digital platforms. We thus prefer to think of the relations between humans and media as mutually shaping phenomena.

We also distinguish between social media and social networking. Social media is about publishing content. The online forms of such communication (which can happen on social networking sites, or SNS), allow for the possible creation of online communities, but are more often used to share personal messages, ideas, information, and other content like text, images, videos, memes, and GIFs—without any conversational expectations. Social media allows for communication that is theoretically interpersonal, but that has evolved into and is most often used for the one-to-many forms of communication that were previously within the purview of mass media alone (e.g., newspapers, television). Social media communication is thus often monologic (in the Bakhtinian sense), insofar as a social media post is a one-sided conversation, uninterested in responses—though responses might be accepted and even minimally acknowledged through likes or emojis. Social media has become the tool for marketers and influencers, for those hoping to cash in on targeted advertising or commodify their personhood online. For instance, following Alice Marwick, in Chapter 3 we show how a person performs celebrity through social media (a transition from the idea that people are celebrities), and does the speaking, content publishing, and self-promotion to generate cultural or monetary capital. Social media connects followers and fans of people or topics/objects rather than friends and contacts. The goal of social media communication is to publish information, convince other people to interact with a person’s brand or cause, and/or convince others to take some sort of action. Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok are used often today for this type of one-to-many o...