Your Stage Presence on the Web

Your Stage Presence on the Web
Another thoughtful Sunday Read from David Amerland.
The Sunday Read is the first thing I do on Sunday mornings, after the requisite kitty rituals. Then I take the day to think about the post and think about the comment stream.
I've made some wonderful friends here on Google+ from the conversations that ensue from these weekly thought sparks. 
I've learned to put my thoughts out there in response and to be vulnerable in making responses. 

#vulnerability   #webpresence  

Originally shared by David Amerland

Public Lives

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…” in _As You Like It (https://goo.gl/6J0isV) Shakespeare drew from the literature of the past to immortalize a moment and give us one of the most frequently quoted phrases of his. 

In his play, a family vies for power, the principal actors are disguised playing others than themselves and in a truly Shakespearean touch more than one of them accept a role reversal, their disguised selves stepping into the shoes of others to role play a scenario. Through these ploys Shakespeare renders transparent the machinations of man, the powerplays of relationships and the motives that drive interactions, all in the most transparent wrapper of all: the staged theatrical play (https://goo.gl/TEtOK2).

The reason plays are so old as an art form is that beyond their entertainment value they also hold a didactic element. By including the audience in their acknowledgement and, sometimes, even their participation (https://goo.gl/4TFPyV) they create a knowing art form that’s a verisimilitude of reality which creates a sense of empowerment, as well as a tacit acceptance of the fact that nothing, ever, occurs in a vacuum (http://goo.gl/MYJ7tN). 

We’ve always used participatory, interactive forms of theatre to learn: https://goo.gl/NxgYTS. The movement of theatrical realism that sprung, during the 19th century, from it, was intended to deliver a great fidelity of feeling and experience: https://goo.gl/6HWVNU, to show us, in other words, more truth than lies. More of a sense of raw emotion than playacting. 

The psychology of participation is an interesting one. Not only does awareness of being watched change what is being said (and shared) but a clearer sense of the nature of the audience predetermines the reality of what will occur on stage: http://goo.gl/aF31MO. 

All of this is important to us now because social media does actually turn the whole world into a stage even as theatre itself, perversely, struggles to get it right: http://goo.gl/KVjNTH. 

Stories, like those about Ben Carson (http://goo.gl/lEitOx) who seems to believe his own Press (http://goo.gl/0iT97W) to more mundane instances like when Brian met Melissa (http://goo.gl/Rz975l) turning an ordinary, everyday kind of encounter into a life-defining moment for all of them. Or when a parent decided to post his parenting skills on YouTube (http://goo.gl/L3bN3q) marking the fact that parenting has also now become a global participatory experience: http://goo.gl/ElPniS. All of these show that the ‘show’ has changed. Life has become more interconnected and eminently shareable and the compartmentalization of the past that led to convenient lies and half-truths is no longer available. 

When everything we do is part of the public domain things change perceptively: http://goo.gl/Sv20U9. For a start our social activity and online lives acquire as much value, at least, as our offline ones as Mike Allton  pointed out in a recent post: https://goo.gl/gNAfQY. 

In transparency, you’re really talking about creating a culture of trust, where you are able to show (and defend) your motivation as well as explain the rationale of your actions. And when these are not well-explained or clearly understood there may well be reason to worry as Gideon Rosenblatt  highlighted in a recent post on the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal: https://goo.gl/DCAHps.

Trust and how to create it, is never really far from our minds these days and in a recent HOA with Zara Altair  I discussed the different ways in which it affects us and why conceptually we have so many issues with it (https://goo.gl/7JgcmT), particularly in the case of the VW story that is simply running and running and running: https://goo.gl/sIyHik. 

Transparency is also changing the culture of trust within the tech industry: http://goo.gl/E1KHRs leading to an even more transparent world where, on stage, we struggle with our understanding of what’s important to us, what’s important to those who see what we do, what’s critical for the world we live in and how all this, together, begins to form a kind of new identity where our actions as actors (https://goo.gl/YhXXzz) are true to our inner belief system in a way that begins an earnest conversation on the values we want to explore and the values we want to uphold: http://goo.gl/vPkxJ5. 

We are more than the sum of our parts or the summaries of our roles. The challenge today is a steep one. It takes what we do, even in play, seriously enough to require us to seriously think about our presence, its impact and the way we each interact, think, behave, share and project. When we all matter then everything we do, also matters and that is a lot of responsibility to constantly keep in mind. 

Hopefully we will work it out. 

And with that, I have to say that I really hope you stocked up on doughnuts (in which I am now a world-renown expert: https://goo.gl/lN62Ip), cookies, croissants and chocolate cake plus, of course, the obligatory tanker load of coffee to help make Sunday special. Have an awesome one, wherever you are.