Debate: in progress

A group of four individuals have a ‘live debate’ set up as a traditional/political debate. Their words are taken directly from online debates. The viewer sees a group of four well-dressed individuals standing in front of a black screen, each behind a podium.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

• What is the archetypal structure of online debates? i.e. main structural points

• does each individual personify a particular rhetoric style or personality style that emerges online? i.e. the intellectual vs the troll Alternatively, characters are interchangeable – people wearing different masks online

• to what extent is the debate coferent?

• What you write about is the gap between the triangulated points

• What we remember – obscene, vivid = find that point

• what is the tone? Progress from banal to serious?

STRUCTURE OF ONLINE DEBATES

-non sequitors

-insulting

-absurd strawman

-sweeping statements

-Voice of reason is pedantic and always drowned out

-godwin’s law

PHRASING OF DEBATES

-Bracketed phrases

-run-on sentences

-CAPS – yelling

-noises

-words drawn ouuuut

smh/lmao

-colloquial pretention

emojis – bring it out – could lead to something very surreal

TOPICS

-chicken vs egg

-TV shows/film i.e. harry potter vs LOTR

-moonlanding

-vaccination/holistic medicine

-gun control

-climate change

-cultural appropriation

-BLM

-feminism

-holocaust

NOTES

don’t ignore the context of online

– i.e. the silent majority watching entertained

- interaction of people that would never normally interact

-wide location of speakers (maybe actors are in different locations)

play with different registers\bring out the uncanny\

-guy citing facts – present it as government film i.e. how person means to present it

-then you have 14-year-old girl yelling at the docs from her bedroom

-then the spammer redirects you to an unrelated site

-investing the sign with meaning (in reference to avatars, online personalities)

-purest manifestation of the mass (Baudrillard)

-the translation of personality as spectacle

need topics to ground it - prevent questioning of topic

build mind of the character to be able to write a script

physical displacement in real time

Tino Seghal – performers speak to audience

postponement

Gun Violence example

Debate screenshots