Thursday 12 February 2015

what's this all about?

We don't 'consume' technology. We experience it. McCarthy and Wright had that insight over a decade ago, and they're not alone.

But when it comes to digital media technology - photos, videos, songs, social networks - we don't just experience. We perform.

With every snapshot we share and every line of text we post, we become a little bit more of who we are, or who we are trying to appear to be.

'Performance' has nasty connotations of falseness or manipulation. This might be the case sometimes, or in some small way most of the time. But what would the opposite be? Authenticity? Is there really a snapshot or a tweet that captures the essence of a human being? That might be the case sometimes, or in some small way most of the time...

Performative Experience Design (PED) is the design-oriented study of ways of interacting with digital media technology that focuses on the experience of that interaction among the person, her digital media, and the other people who become aware of that interaction. PED doesn't look at the technology itself, or even at the interaction between the technology and its 'user', but at the ways the 'user' experiences herself in relation to her digital media and the people with whom she shares that experience. And that relationship is a performative one.

'Performing' doesn't necessarily mean jazz-hands-and-bright-lights theatrical performance. The words 'performance' and 'performativity' also conjure up J.L. Austin's performative utterances, Judith Butler's discourse that trumps even biology and leaves precious little room for resistance, Victor Turner's study of ritual performance, Erving Goffman's theatrical metaphor of the presentation of self, Richard Schechner's wonderfully pithy 'showing doing', Jill Dolan's utopian performatives, research on embodiment, research on situated interactions, research on audiences and spectatorship - and this is just off the top of my head. In fact, a large part of the project of PED is to unpack exactly what we mean by 'performative' and where those different definitions might lead us.

When I put a picture on Instagram, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I show you my holiday photos on my phone over lunch, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I take to the stage and project a video about myself, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I use my digital photos and social networks as inspiration for a performance that has no digital elements at all, I'm doing a performative interaction.

These things matter. A billion Facebook users and counting. Careers made on YouTube. Lives threatened on Twitter. Lives ruined over Snapchat. The important thing isn't just the technology, or the interface, or in a way even the content. The important thing is how we use this technology to experience our lives and perform those experiences, for ourselves and for each other.

That's something worth studying. Worth designing for. Worth playing with.

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