WTFPL

Changed my license to WTFPL, thought it would be more fun.

Post-Modern Dramaturgy

This post has been neglected and unpublished since May 20th 2012,

Dramaturgy has, in a sense, evolved. From the theatre stage to the live studio. A pretentious art house TV serial if you will. A much gritty remix from the likes of 90’s Friends or the currently popular How I Met Your Mother, in which the supporting characters are cut out from time to time, and very much replaceable. They are after all generic roles. Glitter to what seems a fulfilling and meaningful life, these supporting roles add richness to ones life but are, nonetheless, of no added value to what is considered to be something so fulfilling and meaningful. Contentment of sorts on what we define as our far from drab lives. Subjective colourful additives that we conclude from delusion to state that we live the normative, that we are fine. We are the central characters and most of those unimportant extras are freely added and excluded from our multi-seasonal-high-budget-long-running sitcom/soap.

A society that adds and rejects social relationships in a routine manner: is life imitating social media or did social media build its foundation on this very fact? We have been selecting our main characters in our sitcom/soap since our first social interaction. This is based on the fact that who we choose or don’t choose to become friends with, how we interact with our siblings, quality on how we involve our parents, who we choose to become our romantic partners, how we interact with authority, etc. Who we surround us with was a choice we made along the way, which started a long time ago. We have a choice to be solitude or outgoing, popular or secluded, fit-in or eccentric, and yet with all those choices, we still can also choose to be noticed or not. The main purpose of a sitcom/soap is to interest viewers on the initial pitch. Some gain an audience, some fail. The difference between real life sitcoms/soaps and television network broadcasts are that even the sitcoms/soaps that don’t gain audience still survive on air (at least as long as the main character stays alive that is). Imagine a sitcom/soap that that spans 20 seasons, filled only with monologues or lack thereof, with this bastard typing on his computer keyboard for years on end  masturbating from time to time in some small community housing in some first world country.

Anyway, the above would be the front stage. What the audience sees, what happens in the backstage, at least in traditional form, are usually reserved for ones own inner thoughts, ranging from the manic to depressive passing through a whole bunch of gradients. The concept of live studio takes this backstage to the audience. We see it a lot in blogs like this one, on twitter, on facebook status, and more recently on path. What the post-modern society delivers is an in your face experience of things we would rather see in the backstage, and not unlike live studio, backstages are somehow set up; scripted bloopers and the like. Re-imaging as a means to be what we want others to perceive: the looking glass self backwards.  Online social media has challenged the whole concept of symbolic interactionism, where the individual does not need the others feedback, hiding behind a virtual wall that protects the individual with random justification.