Page 210 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 201
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to the viewer, the “continuous suture” of the game actually makes for a more
powerfully immersive apparatus or mechanism; one, as it were, without
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breaks . This all begins to sound so much like slavery. For the game
program’s the gamer, just as the programmer would first have presumably
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programmed ‘the program’ ..
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While on the 1.0 side we have the remediated locked conveyer-belt
of the filmic world so theorised, on the other (new side) we have a theory
which would supplant such subjections. For these media ‘performances’
really cannot be seen as ‘programs’ and call for a much freer interactor to
marry-up with the much freer post-programming of this modern world. Enter
2.0.

3. Theory 2.0: First-Person Performatives
Here we can see coming into view a first-person experience in the
sense of someone who comes ‘before’ something in all their
phenomenological purity. Keeping this in mind it is important to explore here
two key components in 2.0’s armoury: ‘reflexivity’ and ‘performativity’. To
take the first. Key Media 2.0 theorist Gauntlett argues that sociologist
Giddens’ notion of reflexive identity provides a key lever in coming to a
clearer theoretical understanding of the contours of the present media
landscape:

Giddens is fascinated by the growing amounts of reflexivity
in all aspects of society, from formal government at one
end of the scale to intimate sexual relationships at the other
[...]. Doing things just because people did them in the past
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is – is the opposite of modern reflexivity.

Thus we seem to have moved on from a traditional society with its
unreflective doing-as-is-done; a machinic society of robotically pre-
conscious ‘they-selfs’ where audiences were locked into the linearity of the
media’s handiwork. For here at least 2.0 agrees with 1.0, but argues however
that now the world has moved along from such multitudinal ‘they-selfs’ to
more singularly present ‘my-self’ narrations and more singular life-times. To
outline the contours of these flexible identities Gauntlett utilises Judith
Butler’s notion of the ‘Performative’ but must first provide a little more
flexibility for it in order to purchase a little more freedom for his own
performative:

Furthermore we do not need to worry too much about this
[that the perfomative is not radically free of the materiality
of the body]: every thinker puts forward tools which we can
choose to use, or modify, or reject. I feel that the tools in