I’m on the bus from the airport and I’ve been reading the recommended literature for the IETM on the plane. This short ranty-blog is probably best framed by the fact that the bus here helpfully has an accessible digital information screen on board, but is also simultaneously filming my every move on CCTV.
(helpful)
(scary)
Reading the literature has been a useful exercise: it covers some recognisable debates around the converging of performance and technology, and delves helpfully into the underpinning ideologies that inform often oppositional perspectives on the marriage of the digital and the live.
What’s a relief is how far what I’ve read so far also confirms an inevitability of the human condition, and one that isn’t going to be derailed by the digital any time soon (though is already being adapted in terms of form and structure): a desire for communal storytelling in real space and time.
The flip side here is the use of the word ‘real’ and the insistence in this literature of how far ‘digital natives’ (Generation Y, coming up behind us mid-30s mid-career theatre-makers) no longer maintain such clear distinctions between real and virtual space and time.
The forming and maintenance of communities, social bonds, relationships, play and debate increasingly exist for these ‘natives’ not in a virtual or digital realm, but just in life. There’s been no digital shift for them: it’s life as it’s always been lived.
And as technology continues to seamlessly blend interactions between humans, machines and services via the apparatus for communications constructed around them – largely by profiteering capitalist companies – it in turn begins to construct us through ‘big data’ harvesting and an ability to therefore subtly suggest, coerce, manipulate and direct the choices that create our identity: the books we read, the films we watch, the music we download and the holidays we choose to take.
You’ll probably all be familiar with the ‘Enjoyed this? You should try…’ recommendations via Amazon or Netflix. Recommended on the basis of what? A particular set of contexts that required a particular purchase at a particular time in your life. The suggestion is inherently reductive – actually, I’m more than just that self, that version of me at that time.
But many of us will click, intrigued. We benignly follow the pathway being laid out before us by global commerce. We’re sold versions of ourselves, via suggested identities that we turn into self-fulfilling prophecies with a single click.
To round off this set of bleary-eyed-5.00am-start thoughts: what this has got to do with playwriting then?
For me it’s how the casual chain of desire, persuasion, opportunity, choice and change in human beings is being gently massaged by capitalist forces via the tools of digital communication they’ve created: and which we become increasingly reliant on probably because they’re quick, efficient, accessible and hassle-free.
They allow us to continue in a relentless pursuit of an ideal (that was also sold to us at some point as capitalism is forced to innovate over and over – how do we keep people relentlessly wanting things) of anything we want, at any time we want it.
I’m not sure I want to subscribe to the ideal, or the massaging. And if this situation was amplified as a play of my life, I’d be properly terrified.