*ĭespite games having existed for virtually all of human history, long, long before consumer theater, there was virtually no formal analysis of games, nor of the spaces they create, in Western scholarship until the 1930s. By building a separate game space, the forest of Arden, within the game space of the play, we are not only told how to participate, but also sold on why participating is a good idea, something that makes the play incredibly valuable, not just as a historical artifact that helps us understand early attitudes toward the theater, but also as a sentimental work that reaffirms the value of these wonderful spaces for all of us. It’s in this context that I think As You Like It is so valuable fundamentally, it’s an introduction to the concept of the consumer theater, of this new game space that we consciously create via works of “media” and to how we’re expected to act to gain value from it. It’s this understanding of theater as a new kind of modern game space, that I think was at the forefront for Shakespeare’s audience, who were coming to the theater, not as we do, with centuries of practice and preconception, but as hesitant newcomers, who didn’t know exactly how to interact with the stage play or what it could offer. They lay bare the fundamental nature of what we’re doing when we consume media, they make it easier for us to realize that what we’re doing is profoundly artificial, and they allow us to more easily examine what exactly it is we’re doing when we think we’re passively consuming media. And it’s for this reason that video games, and game spaces more generally, have been such a useful tool for media discourse. They all share the common attribute of being some constructed, artificial object, with which a designated audience engages. Or the past fifty years, in which an entirely new form of media, video games, made interaction with the work a key part of the work itself and opened up an entire new way of asking, talking, and thinking about what it meant to engage with media, what constituted a “text,” and to what degree social activities are enabled and to what degree they relate to the media that enables them.īut all of these forms of media are fundamentally just that: media. Take, for example, how the record, the magnetic tape, the cassette, the portable Walkman, the iPod, and streaming have all dramatically changed what experiences are connoted by the phrase “listen to music.” Or how the Internet itself has fundamentally changed how we relate to media and what it means to create derivative work. Such changes are often spurred by new technology. The patterns of consumption of the museum have changed extraordinarily in the past ten years alone, not to mention the past one hundred. Originating from mere private collections that allowed visitors, the modern museum has evolved through a dizzying array of iterations and behaviors, from the luxury gallery, to the grand public salon, to the state funded exhibition hall, all the way to today’s focus on incorporating related media and emphasizing new kinds of scholarship through written and audiovisual materials. ![]() Even formats like the museum, an institution we perceive as culturally static, have significantly changed through the centuries. The concept we now take for granted, of sitting quietly and absorbing a theatrical work, was largely the work of one man, Richard Wagner, who wrote a new form of opera that deliberately sacrificed a form of audience interaction for greater complexity, and as such had to make the very hard sell to audiences of a new form of consumption that demanded greater restraint on the part of the audience. ![]() Instead, the sequences of interactions with displays of media we call “consumption” are largely thought of as an automatic, unchangeable behavior, like eating or breathing.īut this, of course, isn’t true the appropriate way to consume media varies, widely and often. Fundamentally, the consumption of media is learned behavior to sit still and absorb information, or to react in appropriate ways, is not a behavior we’re born with, and we all pick it up so quickly that society has learned to stop thinking of it as an acquired behavior. Something I feel we all take for granted in our modern media-saturated society, where we casually interact with media all the time without really thinking about what we’re doing, is just how instinctively we know how to do it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |