Dramaturgy of Digital Experience (original) (raw)

In early 2012, Nielson announced its latest label for persons aged 18-34: “Generation C,” for “Connected.” Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized how we converse, consume, play, and protest. Mobile devices allow us to carry the Internet with us wherever we go, which provides us with instantaneous connectivity to personal or professional networks and endless sources of information that influence our everyday realities. Media forms overlap and converge and digital media surround us almost every waking hour. “Digital experience,” as a title for this paper, can include almost any social activity, from the most obviously digital—such as immersive virtual worlds where people interact with others in avatar forms, to less obvious everyday moments, like riding on a bus full of people tethered to their (our) mobile phones, individually connected to immense global networks, perhaps blithe to the one in which they’re physically located, or as Sherry Turkle recently writes, “alone together.” Through convergence, mobility, and always-on patterns of use, ‘digital’ frames for experience grow more transparent and ever more powerful mediators of everyday life. What challenge does this pose for a dramaturgic perspective? What differentiates digital or Internet-mediated contexts from other earlier mediating technologies, such as language, writing, and electronic media such as telephones, radios, televisions and fax machines? What’s different about how we conceptualize and experience self, identity, and social experience, given the ubiquity of digital media in our everyday lives? The strength of the dramaturgic approach is that it focuses on how meaning is constructed interactively. Theoretically, the framework is well suited to grapple with the intricate overlapping layers of action that comprise digital contexts. Methodologically, dramaturgic approaches are challenged to grapple with unprecedented layers and flows of global, networked information, which complicate research practices that were developed for and remain entrenched in the study of traditional, physically situated social environments. In this paper, I address some of these challenges and questions: First, I outline key characteristics of digital interaction to illustrate how these influence presence, self-presentation, and sociality. I argue that digital media heighten dramaturgical awareness because of the need to deliberately write self into being, an activity that requires both technical skills and reflexivity about what is required to enact embodiment. Second, I discuss how certain unique aspects of virtual and networked practice complicate and blur conventional dramaturgic categories such as the individual, the interaction, and the situation. I suggest that that these shifts in everyday enactments pose significant methodological challenges to the researcher. Finally, I conclude by discussing the importance of continuing to develop creative and innovative research practices that resonate with contemporary networked social contexts.