Affirmative – 2nd Speaker –Group 2#. Jessica Davis

Rebuttal: In today’s society Mediation can be witnessed in everyday live performances reinforcing their coexistence. E.g. A cricket game will wait for the decision of an electronic umpire or an audience listening to a rock group through amplifiers.

One example of a Type of Liveness is, “Live Broadcasts”, which as Auslander stated, is where “...performers and audience are temporally co-present in that the audience witnesses the performance as it happens, but they are not spatially co-present”, Pp60. This is a transformation of the original definition of “Live” as Space has become variable highlighting the integration of Mediation into Liveness.

This can also be observed in reference to “Live Recordings”, which Auslander described as an Oxymoron due to the fact that the original definition of “live” was for the performer and audience to be co-present, but with live recording this is contradicted as “Time” and “Space” become variable. For example, you can now listen to a live recording of Pink Floyd from 1966 in, present day, from the comfort and privacy of your room. This creates an intimacy between audience and performer that a studio album can’t produce, but without the hassle or cost of leaving your Private Space to go see a crowded live performance in a Public Space. “Types of Liveness” have evolved becoming vast due to technological developments, resulting in the definition of “live” to become more varied and reliant on mediation.

We as media users don't feel the need to distinguish types of “Liveness” as they have become so interdependent. However, by identifying these types we can examine the complementing relationship of “Liveness” and “mediation” to a greater extent. “Online Liveness” and “Social Liveness” are two, more complex examples of modern forms of ‘”liveness”. They are the result of the introduction of the internet, which was suggested in the reading, like other modern technologies to attempt to remediate the T.V. “Liveness”, in regards to the internet, refers to the interaction between the user and the machine resulting in what Auslander phrases “...a subjective encounter with a persona” and consequently a “...feeling of liveness and sense of the machines agency..” Pp13. This active experience of “Online Liveness” can be observed with sites like Youtube, Facebook and Skype, where we interact allowing the immediacy and intimacy of the internet and the response we receive to feel live to us. Morse (1998) describes the feeling of liveness to be mainly a result of the “feedback loop”, this is when “..the website responds to our input”, Pp62. As a result of these varied types of “Liveness” the audience's perception of liveness is being changed by the convergence of live and mediatised performances consequently causing a change in media tastes.

Walter Benjamin argues that our perception is shaped by Mediatisation due to the fact that mediated content has become naturalised. And I quote: ‘Eyes and ears have been conditioned by mediatisation’, Pp34. The mediated performance being transformed by the audience to be natural is a result of the audience desire intimacy with the artist; so to satisfy the mass culture Live and Mediated performances must go hand in hand.

Everything is becoming less fixed, time, space, sound, vision, liveness and mediation.