Mediatization’s Promise and Downfall: Facebook, <i>Our World</i>, and Mike Bartlett’s <i>Love, Love, Love</i>

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.