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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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Social Media. The Opera is dying, All Hail the Circus

By Nick Hodge | May 28, 2009

Photo by bootload/Peter Renshaw

The Opera. Stages filled with ladies singing in a gruff ger­manic or romantic lan­guage, and men pran­cing around in col­our­ful sol­dierly uni­form. Stor­ies so simple yet obscured by lan­guage; thank­fully the Play­bill™ details the plot. Plots of love lost and fam­ily betrayal, have remained unchanged in some instances for cen­tur­ies. The audi­ence silent in the stalls, listens and applauds at the appro­pri­ate places. It is all scrip­ted and fol­lows a well worn path.

Strong scripts, strident soar­ing songs and stand­ard­ised char­ac­ters are repeated year after year to an audi­ence that dresses up to show off their cul­tural status. Baby boomers, once the bas­tions of cul­tural icon­o­clasm, now flock to the safety of the opera. The safety of the known story provides suc­cour in a troub­ling and con­fused world.

The Opera is an appro­pri­ate mir­ror of a slowly declin­ing, old power struc­ture: stand­ard­ised stor­ies with a strong cul­tural under­stand­ing of expect­a­tions. There are few sur­prises, and the act­ors faith­fully rep­res­ent the char­ac­ters as writ­ten. To stray from the cul­ture will res­ult in review rebuke, and poten­tially fin­an­cial ruin. The utter­ances are known, and everything fits into the story.

In the mod­ern, hyper­con­nec­ted world where every­one wants to write their own scripts; to merely ape an old opera is stale. It no longer res­on­ates, nor does it excite. The worn path may provide tem­por­ary com­fort: but does not provide long term sustenance.

At the opera, the generously-proportioned female singer has begun her last stanza.

The Cir­cus. I remem­ber the cir­cus arriv­ing in our small coun­try town. I, and the hoard of kids and teach­ers tramped down to the town’s foot­ball oval to oggle. The anim­als we eyed were from a dis­tant con­tin­ent. Lions, Tigers, Bears and Ele­phants. It was like a zoo, but the anim­als were smel­lier and close. Eat­ing and stomp­ing close.

Tra­di­tional cir­cuses such as these are now rare. Cir­cuses with the animal mena­gerie are rarer, as they have been houn­ded out of our towns by animal lib­er­a­tion­ists. A tra­di­tion, as cul­tural as steeple­chas­ing, has van­ished into the mist. The anim­als are happier.

Mod­ern cir­cuses are about people. The anim­als have been sequestered and retired to zoos and forests. Cir­cuses such as Quebec’s Circ du Soleil give a medi­eval com­media dell’arte a mod­ern fla­vour wrapped in a bright coat of 21st cen­tury glob­al­ised com­mer­cial­ism. Com­pletely com­prised of people, fran­chised to a cul­tur­ally flattened world; there­fore stand­ard­ised to high­light human per­form­ance. These cir­cuses are for people, about people and make a point of break­ing the third wall to stretch the entertainment.

In more tra­di­tional cir­cuses, clowns would reg­u­larly break the third wall. Throw faux water, in the shape of con­fetti, into a faux sur­prised audi­ence. The cir­cus enter­tains, as the sad clown provides a reflec­tion on our mixed up, com­plex lives.

This forest we are nav­ig­at­ing through: Social Media, is like a cir­cus. It is a human cent­ric insti­tu­tion, wrapped in new tech­no­logy zeal with a hoard of clowns, mum­mers, so-called ring lead­ers and high-wire acts all scream­ing for your atten­tion, laughs and money. Dif­fi­cult to ignore when they are in town; and they can be smelly at the approach. Bright Lights! Shows! High wire acts with stars hav­ing incon­gru­ous names. Social Media has it all.

A true cir­cus extends out from the focus on the tent and the high­wire of show night. The can­vas rig­gers and animal train­ers trans­form into the spruikers of side-show alley. Crafty games of shoot­ing, prowess of strength and pre­ci­sion take a fool from their money. Fairy floss, candy apples and for­tune tell­ers return a future of rot­ten teeth and rot­ted minds.

In a sim­ilar way, Social media has a pleth­ora of spruikers. The games they advert­ise remove you are after your gold. Some of these games have a large pay off; sadly many don’t.

To really enjoy the cir­cus, you must exper­i­ence the whole show, not merely snack on the fairy floss and candy apples.

Social net­work­ing is more than the latest crazes of Twit­ter and Face­book. In fact, it pred­ates blogs. And the WWW, even if you could hand-code HTML. Even before the inter­net escaped from the uni­ver­sity cage and it’s train­ers, there have exis­ted “social medias”. Email, Bul­letin board sys­tems, Talk-back radio. Small news­pa­pers and magazines; tele­graph wir­ings and Morse code; pamph­let and book pub­lish­ing. All add to the social dis­course. In fact, since the demo­crat­isa­tion of com­mu­nic­a­tion that began with the print­ing press: where thoughts in the form of words could be etched and pro­duced enmasse; a social dis­course has existed.

What is dif­fer­ent is the con­nectiv­ity we all enjoy. We all are a few steps away from the human­ity that encom­passes the planet. At once in one large, multi-cultural cir­cus. No one mono-culture can exist. Gen­er­al­iz­a­tions break down as indi­vidu­als assert their indi­vidual char­ac­ter­ist­ics, sub­vert­ing the propensity for tra­di­tional hier­arch­ies to clas­sify, box and bucket.

The impact of this indi­vidual yet share instant exper­i­ence is being being felt now across busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments. Unre­lent­ing forces for change are singing strident tunes from the opera, whilst the cir­cus clowns laugh in mock humour at the futil­ity on the grave of the generously-proportioned female vocalist.

Topics: future, internet, socialmedia | 1 Comment »