Back from a few days in Berlin. Unavoidable, yet incredibly energizing intellectually. I did not have a chance to visit the theater (I basically flew in, gave my talk, and flew out), but I was able to have some amazing conversations, some of them focused on what is increasingly being called social media theater. At this point it’s old hat for bands like Nine Inch Nails and TV shows like Lost to make use of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to advance a narrative (and drive audience share). But individuals are starting to employ the same platforms to explore character creation.
There are, for instance, a number of “dead author” Twitter feeds. These are just what they sound like: People channeling the persona of, say, Mark Twain or Ralph Waldo Emerson to “speak” to a readership. Think about the implications of this. It’s an acknowledgement that not only creative works, but the creative minds behind them, have entered a public domain. As with “fan fiction,” a quasi-political statement is being made here: Stories are collectively owned, intellectual property be damned. I’ve made a “Twitter list” of dead authors, so you can easily get a taste of what I’m talking about by going here. What will also be evident is why people are calling this “social media theater.” What we’re seeing is the emergence (I would argue) of an inherently dialogic artform.
In the next post I’ll look at more explicit forms of theater playing out on these platforms.
