The (Not So) Deep Time of Social Media Theater: An Afterword

Abstract

In a concluding afterword, Sarah Bay-Cheng considers the legacies of more recent media from the mid-twentieth century, primarily the relationships between the emergence of television and computers post-World War II. Reexamining the critical reflections of French sociologist, Jacques Ellul in his The Technological Society (1954; trans. 1964), she considers contemporary performances that draw on the formal, conceptual, and technological characteristics from that period, in particular the structure of television boxes and their parallels to twenty-first-century social media. As an example, she analyzes the performance installation, My Voice Has an Echo in It (2014), by Kenneth Collins and his New York-based company Temporary Distortion. Considering contemporary media, Bay-Cheng demonstrates how current media forms continue to reconfigure and replay earlier medial histories.