Mobile Apps Make Everyday Life Performance
In 1998, born out of postmodern social theory, Abercrombie and Longhurst raised that “everyday life is performance that we are unaware of it in ourselves or in others. Life is a constant performance; we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time. Performance is not a discrete event” (73). Life as performance is not a new idea, as Erving Goffman in his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969) had already stated ideas similar. Yet Abercrombie and Longhurst differentiated their theory from Goffman’s by saying it “specific to contemporary society” rather than in general of all time and placing the role of media at centrality in everyday life performance (74). As Abercrombie and Longhurst wrote, “Audiences…increasingly roam across and between different media. Therefore, it can be suggested that these processes of identification and the production of self in a spectacularized society increasingly involve the interactions of different media” (165). Written in 1998, by “different media”, Abercrombie and Longhurst mainly refer to film, television, broadcast, audio recording, and print media. And now with the help of the mobile phone as a new platform on which online streaming, news reading, social networking, gaming can be more easily and conveniently accessed, today’s society is a more media drenched society than ever before. Mobile phone apps provide convenience for people to make everyday life performance by having more convenient access to “immerse” in imagination and sharing their life as if “on stage”.
One example of how mobile phones as a platform providing more convenient access for one to immerse in imagination is listening to music. As Simon Firth wrote that “Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives. Such a fusion of imaginative fantasy and bodily practice marks also the integration of aesthetics and ethics” (124), and “what makes it special for identity is that it defines a space without boundaries…we are only where the music takes us” (125). In Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences, one example was about how the interviewee Victoria T spoke of the meaning of listening to music to her is that “it makes me feel like… it’s background music to a movie I’m part of since my dreams and desires are of being in a movie, I feel pleasure and ease with classical music” (103). And with the help of music apps like Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify Music, Wangyiyun Music and other kinds of music apps on mobiles, access to music is convenient as well as sparking the imagination along with it. The music apps probably are what we have taken for granted nowadays. But how about apps that blend augmented reality (AR) with real-world scenarios that go more forward than music apps that can make us see the world differently and extend the scope of our imagination with the help of technology?
Pokemon Go launched in 2016 has an estimated 27 million users in the United States in 2016 and the figure is going to hit 67 million in 2020. The recent Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched in April 2019 has three million users now. These games blend the real world with gaming elements that what Caillois said that play as “a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place” is challenged (6).
Besides games, apps like Houzz, Ikea Place which are home goods and furniture sellers using AR techniques to show potential customers their imagined interior design.
YouCam Makeup and Wanna Kicks are apps that applied AR techniques to sell cosmetics and sneakers that one can virtually try on by using their apps.
These apps provide sources for one to imagine many aspects of their life from their real-life surroundings, their home, to their personal image from makeup to clothing. It shows how consumerism has been pervasive with the development of technology and the use of media. And according to Abercrombie and Longhurst, consumerism is closely related to daydreaming and performance. The mobile phone as a platform provides convenient access for one to imagine and perform in their imagination.
Moreover, along with these apps that we know we are imagining a scenario, there are also mobile apps that we use without being aware that we are “imagining” and “performing”. As Abercrombie and Longhurst wrote, “one of the effects of the intrusion of the media into everyday life is the way that formerly innocent events become turned into performances with the further result that the people involved in those events come to see themselves as performers” (72). Social media app is a great example that it gives user freedom to design their home pages, choose their profile representations, organize and promote their thoughts, behaviors, life to others. In other words, one can customize their online life according to the “role” one wants to play. The profile pictures on social media apps play a significant role in how we define our “role”. As Coleman wrote in his Hello Avatar, “Looking like someone must also have the quality of acting like someone, or the feeling of connection is lost. Embodiment does not only mean having a particular appearance; it also means behaving in particular ways”, playing our social media apps every day with the profile picture we have chosen is already an act of “acting” (29). (see more on the Proteus effect which is about how self-representations changes our behavior in turn in the online environment). And using social media apps every day from Facebook to Instagram, we are not only sharing the moments of our life but also construct a “role” and playing it.
As Abercrombie and Longhurst wrote in 1998 about “the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life”, what they said about newspaper is resonating with the using of mobile apps nowadays. There is almost no way that one can live a day without opening any apps on his or her phone. Manovich once raised the question that “If one person gets all her news via blogs, does this automatically mean that her understanding of the world and important issues is different from a person who only reads mainstream newspapers?” (329). His main concern is the source of information we get every day. And a new question is how the interaction with the media on mobile platforms, this action per se, has changed and transformed our lives from the time when we read newspapers as a routine every day?
Bibliography:
Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. Sage, 1998.
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Coleman, Beth. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation. MIT Press, 2011.
De la Peña, Nonny. “Physical World News In Virtual Spaces. Representation and Embodiment in Immersive Nonfiction.” Media Fields Journal 3 (2011): 1–13.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Livingstone, Sonia. “The Participation Paradigm in Audience Research.” The Communication Review, vol. 16, no. 1–2, Jan. 2013, pp. 21–30.
Manovich, Lev. “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 319–31.
Saker, Michael, and Leighton Evans. “Everyday Life and Locative Play: An Exploration of Foursquare and Playful Engagements with Space and Place:” Media, Culture & Society, Apr. 2016.
Yee, Nick, and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior.” Human Communication Research, vol. 33, no. 3, July 2007, pp. 271–90.
Zagal, José Pablo, and Sebastian Deterding, editors. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge, 2018.
