This group did their entire performance online. They asked the class to bring in laptops if they had them, and they created online personalities that had specific character traits, and they recruited class members to take on those personalities and "enact" them online in Twitter. There was a technical difficulty, b/c Airbears (the wi-fi network) didn't function for the first 10-15 minutes of the class, but eventually the class was able to fully participate in Twitter conversations via the constructed personalities.
Evan: I want to get into a flame war on Twitter. I'm trying to start one but they won't pay attention to me.
Naomi: Twitter was used in a context that's not normally how it's used. People use it to say, I'm at Telegraph and Channing, if anyone's around to chill with me.
Evan: Why would you want to update yourself to the world?
Wafa: Arielle said, you know how you guys update your status on Facebook. I've seen so many people constantly change their status - they want people to know they just went to the dentist.
Evan: Some people have iPhones. They update from wherever they are.
Naomi: Twitter is mainly used by them - people with smart phones. I thought Twitter was really stupid but I had to make an account b/c everyone at my work place was on Twitter. People would say, I'm at this bar, come hang out. If you weren't on Twitter, you weren't invited to certain things. So I had to be on Twitter just to be invited to work stuff.
Wafa: It was a performance online.
Evan: It was totally performance online.
Wafa: It was funny how the performers didn't speak live, they just wanted to type their performance.
Evan: We had specific roles about who we were supposed to be but I didn't play the one that I was given.
Wafa: My computer didn't work but they had specifics like you're supposed to be a shopaholic, so act that way.
Evan: I didn't like being told what to be.
Naomi: They were all very bipolar personalities where you were one thing and nothing else.
Wafa: Like you're nothing else, you're just shopping, you wake up in the morning and you just shop.
Gail: Even if we act online, do we always act a specific part of our personalities online?
Evan: On Twitter, I definitely act as someone else. I want to fool people.
Naomi: But Twitter is a "real person" thing. People use it to connect with other real people in their lives. People might try to be one-sided but then you end up talking about other real parts of their lives.
Evan: If I'm in a chat room where I don't know anyone, I'll just make stuff up.
Gail: This was a hilariously funny performance - it was the funniest by far. I definitely wasn't laughing *at* the performance, it was just amusing at some fundamental level. There was no other group performance that had me ROFLing the entire time, from beginning to end. Watching people interact on Twitter exclusively, not as themselves but as people either the performing group or they invented, and watching the class interact that way *not talking* to each other (they did speak in small groups huddled around the few laptops that did manage to get a wifi connection) was just so awesome. It was so charming - a totally different type of performance. I was so happy that the group performances in this class evolved in this way, where the first one was very very embodied, and the last one was purely online and on screens.
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