Digital performance repository

Yasmine Agocs

The term participatory media suggests how digital media platforms offer opportunities for participation and sharing amongst online communities. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and YouTube encourage participants to post and engage with content for their own individual audience/followers, a performance of their own identity. These spaces also offers a chance for spectators to take a break from performing their everyday identity and engage in a socialization where face and name are not essential to participate. Main, spam, fan, and anonymous accounts allow for participants to engage in the online social sphere without the consequences of being known.

Participatory media invites the spectator to engage with the platform in order to make these connections, and it does so by creating barriers and boundaries into what mode of communication will be done and what can be said. For instance, Snapchat first used pictures with captions as a mode of communication for participants whereas Twitch uses livestream video and chat features for creatures to engage with audience’s written thoughts. But what makes individuals want to post and engage? What is the difference between publicly engaging with an audience versus viewing from the sidelines? And how do new creative works utilize social media in a dramatic context?

The online space is one that does not live within stable temporality but rather a “no-place” and “no-time”, an unceasing of the time of now while existing in simultaneity; in essence, social media occurs with participants in a continuous ethereal present (Bay-Cheng 87). The interconnected nature of the internet can create a sense of belonging in individuals, the ability to reach out to someone on the other side of the world gives one a great sense of power in their communication skills. And yet, our constant endeavour for communicative satisfaction has also been connected to loneliness and disconnection (Le saux-Farmer “Paradigm Shift”); are we ever truly engaging with participatory media if it lives in a “no-place”?

For participatory media to function, there needs to be a drive for spectators to act. In performances such as gameplay walkthroughs or digital theatre, spectators can become more invested in the stimuli that is offered to them when it thus targets a person’s personal emotional response and results in an action that could come in the form of a comment, like, dislike, and more (Xu et al. 6). Comments and engagement with the performance/performer online adds to the overall spectacle in this virtual third place, making the participants more than just their role as audience. Much like the in-betweenness of the state of social media, the participants are also in a state of both/and as the all-encompassing role of “producer-performer-spectator” (Hadley 75).

Taking an example from popular culture, the 2016 film NERVE incorporates the all encompassing idea of producer-performer-spectator through the roles of the “watcher” or the “player”, creating a interactive game of dares chosen by the audience (Lionsgate Movies 2016). While dramatized, the same comparison can be made for Twitch streamers who engage with their live audience and take suggestions for game decisions. Participatory media allows for these interactions to occur to blue the lines between creator and audience.

TikTok and other video-based social platforms also incorporate the idea of a “duet”, where another user may add to the pre-existing video of another user to create a multi-layered co-creator/creator-spectator piece. The infamous “TikTok Hostage situation” incorporates this idea through users adding their own videos to add to a narrative (Best Tiktok On YouTube 2021). The hostage situation refers to a news account on TikTok that invited the hosts partner, and from here the audience playfully joked that the host’s partner looked as if she were held hostage to be in front of the camera. Meme culture played a large role in this mass-collaborative narrative, but it still demonstrates the integration of audience and creator to create a new piece of theatre.

Digital performances blur the boundaries of who is performer/creator and who is meant to watch; the fast-paced environment and simultaneity of online environments enables for audiences to engage in a more personal manner, leaving a new perspective on digital performance through an all-encompassing lens.

Works Cited

Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Temporality.” Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam University Press, 2010.

Best Tiktok On YouTube. “Update on the TikTok hostage situation.” YouTube, Uploaded May 10, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ysr4cid7aE.

Chokshi, Niraj. “The Rise and Fall of the Jeremy Renner App, Which Was A Real Thing.” The New York Times, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/style/jeremy-renner-app.html.

Hadley, Bree. Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2017, pp. 74-108, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54882-1.

Le Saux-Farmer, Danielle. “Paradigm Shift: Making Theatre with Social Media.” Critical Stages/Scenes critiques, The IATC Journal, Issue no. 21, 2020, https://www.critical-stages.org/21/paradigm-shift-making-theatre-with-social-media-in-the-21st-century/.

Lionsgate Movies. “Nerve (2016 Movie) – Official Trailer – ‘Watcher or Player?’.” YouTube, Uploaded May 11, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PR9MOPTI7g.

Xu, Xiao-Yu, et al. “Exploring Viewer Participation in Online Video Game Streaming: A Mixed-Methods Approach.” International Journal of Information Management, vol. 58, 2021, p. 102297–, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.10229.