Mediatization’s Promise and Downfall: Facebook, Our World, and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love

William C. Boles

doi:10.1515/jcde-2025-2003

Article

Mediatization’s Promise and Downfall: Facebook, Our World, and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love

William C. Boles
holds the Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean Chair of English at Rollins College. He authored The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (2011) and Understanding David Henry Hwang (2013). He is also the editor of After In-Yer-Face: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution (2020) and Theatre in a Post-Truth World: Texts, Politics, Performance (2022). His most recent book, Mike Bartlett (2024), is part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Drama series. He serves as co-editor of the Methuen Drama Agitations series with Anja Hartl.

Published/Copyright: April 29, 2025

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 13 Issue 1

Abstract

Throughout his career, Mike Bartlett has kept an eye on and incorporated the ever-changing development of technology into his plays, especially when they prove to be powerful tools for narrative and character conflicts. Bartlett’s first foray into exploring mediatization’s influence on society occurred in Love, Love, Love (2010), which highlights specific moments of technological advancement over a forty-year period, including the 1967 broadcast of Our World, the first live satellite transmission to be broadcast globally. I frame the seminal Our World through a more contemporary technological and global advancement – Facebook, which upon its initial release had great promise to upend the way we define our global society through its portals of communication. Both Our World and Facebook are watershed moments for our digital mediatized society. Both promise youth culture a new way of viewing the world, as seen through the optimistic view of the play’s main characters, Kenneth and Sandra, to the performance of the Beatles during the show. The remainder of Bartlett’s play highlights how the Edenic assurance of mediatization fails to live up to the idealized global village suggested in Our World by foregrounding technology’s movement from a communal global experience to the lone individual, who compartmentalizes media experiences to a value of one. The promise of technology from the 1960 s has failed to move society forward. Instead, it has separated and disrupted communicative patterns, alienating individuals from face-to-face conversations into face-to-screen isolations.

Keywords: Our World ; the Beatles; satellite television; Baby Boomers; Gen X; Facebook; Mike Bartlett; Love

About the author

William C. Boles

holds the Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean Chair of English at Rollins College. He authored The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (2011) and Understanding David Henry Hwang (2013). He is also the editor of After In-Yer-Face: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution (2020) and Theatre in a Post-Truth World: Texts, Politics, Performance (2022). His most recent book, Mike Bartlett (2024), is part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Drama series. He serves as co-editor of the Methuen Drama Agitations series with Anja Hartl.

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Published Online: 2025-04-29

Published in Print: 2025-04-24

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2025-2003

Keywords for this article

Our World; the Beatles; satellite television; Baby Boomers; Gen X; Facebook; Mike Bartlett; Love