Cyborg Audience: Wireless Youth Theatergoers and Their Subjectivities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Multimodal Literacies, Performance Theory, and Digital Technologes

Abstract

Inspired by a student comment that so many young people were online during a school trip to the theater that entire rows “glowed blue”, this paper suggests that young people bring eight new mindsets to bear upon their experience of attending a live play. Drawing upon Haraway (1991), as well as scholars in media education, audience studies and social media studies, the paper then goes on to argue that language arts and drama teachers, as well as researchers, need to understand the post-humanist perspective of this new, hybrid “cyborg audience” if they are to understand how best to prepare students for a school trip to the theater.

Author

• John Mathew Richardson, University of Calgary