Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Your Friends Are Not Your Audience: A Disturbing Internet Lesson In Perspective
NPR: It's a piece of necessary wisdom that will be shared with countless college students this fall by nervous parents: Tell a story at a party, and it's heard by a handful of people, whose reactions you perhaps have some ability to predict. Tell it on the internet, and it will be heard by the people you know and the people you don't — and the latter outnumber the former by several orders of magnitude.
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4 comments:
That is fucked up.
Okay, so I agree with the author that, regardless of whether the story is true, that is completely inappropriate. I can, however, applaud Second City for taking the appropriate action and calling outside forces to handle the matter. I would be appalled at hearing this story told aloud as comedy. But I think there is another good issue that the article only touches upon. Why is this funny to some of the guys in the audience, and why does "Eric" think this story is funny? Probably because he hears jokes like this all the time. Not as severe, but rape or women's rights jokes. The difference is that those who say those to their friends, as the article mentions, know what the reaction will be and know the source of the joke will not be traced back more than one or two tellers. Also, many boys (and occasionally women) I know who make these jokes and one-liners tend to not say them around women or in groups of women, which is a clear indicator that they are not appropriate for the broad audience media can reach. When the venue is this kind of media, it spreads, and people who "Eric" or the joke teller would not typically tell this joke hear about it. And it blows up. As the title says, "Your Friends are Not Your Audience."
This article brillantly illustrates an important message and needs to be undetstood in todays society: there is always a time and place for everything. We tend to take the open dialogue that our society allows for everyone and run it to the extreme. From blogs to Facebook, people feel they have the right (and many times obligation) to say anything and everything that comes into their head. And as this article illustrates, because of this openness, the filter and judgement people use to determine what to and what not to say is often times not used appropriately. As Meg pointed the the title adaquately describes the very issue we have: we incorrectly assume the reaction of those around us will be one similar to our friends. As theater practioners, we must always keep the audience in mind. A show put on for an intimate group of friends should be drastically different from one put on for large Broadway style audiences. But that is not always the case. Sadly, the people in todays society feel the need and right to say everything that comes to their mind, no matter how innapropriate it may be.
I've found myself in situations similar to this one, exact context excluded, and often wonder what is going on through that person's mind. I feel that this article demonstrates both perspectives rather well and respectfully takes into consideration the possibility that this joke was once funny to someone else, once being a key word. "There's a time and a place" always comes to mind when I hear of these situations and I can't help but think if that person skipped out on Kindergarten. As this article states, we've grown accustomed to beating the system with the use of internet connections to display our "work" and I can't help but feel that that mentality has fallen into face to face interactions. Our sense of rebellion is heightened and we want the punch lines to be stronger. But where is that line crossed?
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