#3rd speaker affirmative team (first debate) Xixi

debate summary

modern society has become desensitised to the differences between live and mediated performance through the advent of modern media forms and the way they have shaped our identities as modern audiences.

There has been a shift in audience expectations and responses from the beginnings of live performance to the modern society we live in now, modern audiences have been conditioned by mediatised performance. We are not only mediatizing the 'live' but 'live' is incorporating mediatisation. This can be exemplified in Auslander's reading where Television has raised the bar for the levels of intimacy and immediacy expected by audiences. Our perception of the world and what “live” equates to have been constructed by film and television. The purely live performance is rare. Live performance itself has developed since the replication of the discourse of mediatisation, while new technologies remediate older ones, as film and television both remediated theatre, live performances now endeavours to replicated television, video, and film.

However, in Auslander's reading, it does not touch upon the new technologies we have today - internet, social networks, and DJ and VJ. With the internet, it opens a different sense of 'liveness' and 'realism' to the audiences. This sense of 'liveness' and virtual 'realism' is competely dependent of mediatisation where the medium is the computer and the computer screen - it is a window that extends the audience to another realm of 'liveness'. For example, 'youtube' acts as a platform where people are able to publish or 'go live' online to reach out to audience through the mediatsation of interent and the computer. Here, the notion of 'liveness' has shifted from time. In the traditional context, Auslander comments on 'liveness' been in an environment of the theatrical audiences sitting in front of a prescenium; however, in this day and age, our versions of 'liveness' have become more than just the one. With us modern cyborgs we have culturally and socially conditioned to mediatisation. With the simulation of screens, audiences now can experience 'liveness' in various different ways. The other example is VJ, this is a type of 'liveness' that is dependent on the interpretation of the VJ and then the VJ mixes images on the screen in turn affecting the audience and the atmosphere of the 'live'. Both of these kidns of 'liveness' is a part of our modern social norm, we as audienes expect mediatisations within the live experiences. In our mediatised culture, there is no real distinction between the mediatised and the live.