Liveness and Telepresence
1. In Dixon’s chapter on “liveness,” he’s focused primarily on staged performance, which has a particularly staged quality, versus audiovisual recordings. However, I wonder how his insights can be applied to other communicative forms, particularity asynchronous ones–which would, by virtue of being being asynchronous, are not necessarily live. Dixon’s assertion that presence vis-à-vis audience engagement is “dependent on the compulsion of the audiovisual activity, not on liveness or corporeal three-dimensionality” (132) is useful here, I think.
2. One of my big recurring problems with Stone’s piece was how culture/enculturation was entirely absent from her understanding of how others communicate. In example, she argues information and communication technologies (ICT) operate under the assumption that “humans act at a distance by delegating their agency to someone or something else that has the freedom to travel out of their sight, and if we follow that agency back far enough, eventually we can trace it to the original human’s physical presence, where the buck stops” (183). I would argue it’s not just the body the speaker returns to, but their cultural background equally influences their communicative ability (which is connected, but not synonymous, with the body). The contextualization cues of one speaker may be lost on another, creating miscommunication. Where can we place culture in Stone’s framework, then?
3. Reading Stone and Sobchack side-by-side, I was struck by the role of “play” and metaphor in both. Stone’s use of “prosthetic” is explicitly playful, but as Sobchack persuasively argues, Stone’s usage empties the term of value. As some who works with trans folks (a favorite object of similarly problematic “play” by gender theorists), I’m interested in thinking about the boundary between metaphor and metalepsis in other areas as well.