Content Creation as Performance in Metamodern Society

During the early twentieth century, or late modernity, the Frankfurt School alumnus Walter Benjamin observed a marked difference in what he termed test performances versus final performances in his seminal collection of essays, “The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility”. Benjamin gives special regard to film and the cinema versus the stage as the site of said performance's exhibition and consumption in this essay. The attention he gives film over other media formats of the day is justifiable and valid given its position as the best example of media convergence of Benjamin’s era. In contemporary terms, however, modernity’s optimistic outlook has given way to a more balanced and critical era called metamodernity. In a metamodern context, film has thus been supplanted by online content as the prime example of convergence at work within society, and the digital domain (in the form of the mobile internet) as the substituted site for the cinema. By examining metamodernity as both era and mindset, as well as how the polymediated self is performed within social media content, this paper will establish the practice of content creation as a cultural artefact that demonstrates an exhibition value comparable with that of other immaterial artistic formats, including performance art.