Today in my film class, we discussed a term (which may ot may not be made up by my professor) called performativity. It was described to us as a way to describe the way one performs in the role(s) we choose to play. As an example, we don't have to look any farther than a college lecture hall full of somewhere from 200 to a disgusting 500 students. Sure, we are assumed to be diligently taking notes in our notebooks, or typing up important bulleted points on our laptops, but what are we all REALLY doing?
Writing a letter to our boyfriend...
Lurking that bitch we don't like on Facebook... Watching the latest stand up comedy on Youtube...
I started thinking about the facades we live everyday; and for what? I think that at a certain point, we actually become impossible to trust by others around us because there is a constant assumption that we are putting on a face. I can just imagine professors scanning the lecture hall and seeing students with their laptops open in front of them, making assumptions that we are doing everything but typing the words coming out of their mouths. Have we become so cynical that we can't trust? I haven't.
I think I want to start writing letters to people I haven't really been keeping in touch with.
write (verb)
By writing, I mean the activity involving a pen and piece of paper. A lot of people I know have made this same statement before and it feels kind of meaningless because I never see anyone follow through. Even as I sit here and type this I am thinking of all the things that will steal my time away from doing so. It's like we are caught up in the desire to escape the cage of technology that maintains us day-to-day, but in the end we make no changes. I will continue to be signed on the AIM 24/7, send a text message to a staff member, and e-mail my parents from school. Maybe what we need to accept now is that these things are the meaningful modes of communication today. Will the paper and pen eventually cease to exist?
I would love to be your pen pal.
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