My first speaker spoke about subjective experiences and the idea of "disappearance". Being in a live arena, the context in which you experience an event cannot be recreated, watching a live DVD of a concert is not the same thing. You cannot recreate a "truly live" concert, being there is what creates your experience. The people around you and that which is experience first hand is completely different to watching it on TV. Yes, while there are amplifiers and screens mediating the event, it is how you control what you see and feel that makes the difference.
My second speaker argues that a performance cannot be recreated, that the objects and performance can only exist through a medium and once it is mediated, it can no longer be considered live. The nature of a live performance is through its unpredictability and spontaneity. I will further argue upon this point and round up the negative team’s case.
The word "live" was used as part of a vocabulary designed to contain this debate by describing it and reinstating the former distinction even if it could no longer be sustained experientially. As a consequence of the circumstances under which this vocabulary was instated, the distinction between the live and the recorded was reconceived as one of binary opposition rather than complimentarily.
These ways of conceptualising the live and the distinction between the live and recorded or mediatised originated in the era of analogue technologies and persist to the present day; they form the basis of our current assumptions about liveness. But I will argue here that digital technologies have reshaped our understanding of “liveness”.
Live events allow viewers to pay attention to different things but recorded events give consumers the power to consume as they see fit. We don't just need to ask how attention is controlled -- through live OR recorded events -- but how transparent the means are by which attention is controlled. The more common the mechanisms of representation, the more opportunity there is for manipulation but, also, the more power the individuals may have to critique meaning that comes from familiarity with representation.
I see “awareness” as the defining factor between live and mediated performances. I agree with Auslander when he notes Benjamin’s emphasis on the idea that “human sense perception… is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well”. And while it may be true that it has reshaped our view on what is considered the “sensory norm”, it has also made us aware of the extension of our senses. I would extend upon these lines of argument and argue that rather than an intrinsic opposition between the live and the mediated, that the mediated extends upon the live.
We, the negative team argue that mediated events force audiences (you) to become cyborgs, defined as an extension of yourself through technologies. Cyborgs are a hybrid human and technology, live and mediated, in this case I would use the example of being at a live music concert.
The concert is live, you are in the stadium. The screens and speakers are all around you, Auslander states that this is therefore a mediated event: “Live performance now often incorporates mediatisation such that the live event itself is a product of media technologies. This has been the case to some degree for a long time, of course: as soon as electric amplification is used, one might say that an event is mediatised.” (Auslander, 24). However, I would argue that this is, instead, an extension of human ears and eyes. The cameras act as another set of human eyes, focusing on that which you, the audience member, cannot. The amplifiers act as a hearing aid, merely amplifying that which you can already hear.
I think that the negative team seemed to strive harder for their argument as it was obviously a difficult one, thus presenting their point of view which needed that extra struggle to win the debate.
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