Hamlet on the Holodeck, Drama & Culture

K I wrote this one in my notebook and forgot to type it up, so I'm skipping way back to Hamlet on the Holodeck:

Chapter 10 of Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck focused on the "kaleidoscopic world" that can be represented with new digital media, allowing audiences to choose which characters to follow among a variety of choices, and perhaps by a variety of authors. Murray writes that this "can feel to some like an unauthored world," but I see it as a much more appropriate representation of the real world - in which we each have a unique vantage point, and can get closer or distance ourselves from the perspectives of others. This "ability to capture experience as systems of interrelated actions" suggests that narratives will become more complex in the future, broadening the "good guy/bad guy" stance taken by many television shows and movies to expose the intimate perspectives and motives of each character - something the traditional television show or movie does not have the time to explore.

The "New Beauty, New Truth" section of this chapter reminded me of an essay I read last year, "Drama in a Dramatized Society" by Raymond Williams. Williams argues that with the enormous increase of drama pervading modern life in the form of television, radio, and film, comes a corresponding increase in the dramatization of everyday life. In past centuries, drama would be performed only on special occasions, and required at the very least a trip to a theatre to witness. Now, as television consumes 3-7 hours of the average American’s day, movies are affordable for even the lower classes, and radio is mostly free, our lives are drastically different than those of our ancestors in past centuries. Williams writes, “What we now have is drama as a habitual experience: more in a week, in many case, than most human beings would have previously seen in a lifetime.” With each additional hour we watch of television or movies, Williams suggests that our perceptions of the world become further “scripted” as stereotypes provided by our entertainment begin to replace our unique and individual perceptions of reality. This effects not only our perception and mental organization of the people surrounding us, but also the way we ourselves act and perceive ourselves: “like many actors, people find roles growing on them: they come to fit the part…”

This essay brings up a question that I don't think Murray spends enough time on in her exploration of the effect of new media on our lives. To what extent do we design our own lives based upon the dramas we witness through mass media? Even the “anti-hero,” a “character” that sprang up as an adverse reaction to homogenous mass culture, has become yet another stereotype (eg in movies like Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite, and Donnie Darko). Reflecting these fictions while simultaneously rebelling against them, subcultures like punk, goth, and “nerdcore” fail to escape the representations of new media (though some subcultures consciously fight hard to avoid being appropriated; the 70s punk use of the swastika an example of “don’t mass-market my image” tactics).