Social Media for Social Change

The Spectacle

Posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 7:13 pm by Hunter in research | 3 Comments

Improv Everywhere is a lose collective of people whose intention is to create a scene within an urban environment. The video I posted is documentation from their most known project, where over 200 “agents” froze in place at the exact same time for five minutes.

What I find fascinating about their work is an ability to captivate an audience and turn them into active scenery within the performance. A public space becomes the stage and the actors look just like everyone else.

While many of Improv Everywhere’s projects prove fascinating to watch, it is not often they use their mobility to make much of a critical comment about society and public interaction. Where SMSC fits into this is the notion of creating a spectacle. The tough part will be maintaining a person’s interest without it just becoming entertainment. Once we engage the interested stranger, we will have to consider how we will win their participation.

The most common hybrids of spectacle and public participation are political rallies and protests. It goes without saying these are organized by one group of people who feel the same way. Protesting is great for causing a commotion and garnering recognition for a topic, but it is rare for it to establish a civil discourse between disagreeing bodies. With this in mind, I’m starting to see our project more like a town hall meeting. We will serve as the governing board, but only to foster interaction and direct conversations toward meaningful discourse and debate.

3 Responses to “The Spectacle”

1. # On February 12th, 2009 at 10:09 am Nick wrote:

   I like the townhall meeting metaphor a lot. I think our goal is to set up the space and the parameters where civil discourse can thrive. Its a bit like being a referee (to use gaming language), the ideally, the ref fades into the background, making small adjustments and ensuring the rules are followed, but staying out of the way as much as possible.

2. # On February 13th, 2009 at 4:40 pm Jeremy wrote:

   What I’ve always found interesting about many of Improv Anywhere’s actions is that they often do possess an implicit subversion of public/quasi-public/corporate spaces by pushing the limits of so-called acceptable behavior in public spaces or department stores or subway trains, for example. There’s a connection here, of course, to Guy Debord and the Situationists’ tactics (derive and detournement) — if one is to challenge the hegemony of the all encompassing spectacle of capitalist society/culture, then then the Spectacle must be tackled head-on. Improv Anywhere is not overtly political, but it can be interpreted in this way, I think.

   I appreciate your mention of protests as both political spectacle and political participation. You’re right, as a public political action, the protest can draw attention to certain issues and empower those participating, but rarely do they create spaces for deliberation and discourse. In fact, the opposite is certainly more likely to happen, whereby disagreeing bodies are polarized more extremely and preclude any potential debate.

   Ditto on the town hall metaphor. I think that is a terrific model, one that is also apparent in the online forum or similar message boards. Some appropriate questions are: What are the explicit and tacit codes of behavior in a town hall meeting? How are they facilitated? What are the subtleties of interaction between participants? In the online forum, who facilitates or moderates? What are the rules of debate in those spaces? How and why is the quality of discussion different in an online forum? Fundamentally, how can the two be comparatively analyzed?

3. # On February 13th, 2009 at 5:06 pm Alie wrote:

   Great video, Hunter. I almost posted the Apple store zombies, but I chickened out.

   The townhall meeting/referee concepts are a good analogies for how discussion should proceed once it’s started, but I think part of the difficulty comes from getting people to begin. That’s why I think the Enough Fear red phone campaign is so excellent; it has the draw, the message, and then an opportunity to take an active role. One thing that I’m realizing is fairly important though is the way the intervention is heavily reliant on the subject matter. It makes me feel like that is a pertinent part of the equation we can’t really afford to ever leave out. The Frozen Grand station is really a fun idea and it does pose some sociological questions in its own way, but when someone says “must be some sort of protest” I immediately wonder what it would be for and that would be a pretty bad protest.