Imagine a cellist playing one of Bach’s solo suites,
Does he consider his audience?
(Did Bach, for that matter?)
Does he play the suite differently to audiences
Of different incomes and educations and social backgrounds?
No. The work selects its audience.
You’ll be tempted to ask, “Who is the reader?”
The better question is always, “Who am I to the reader?”
— Several Short Sentences about Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
Faced with this watchful audience, kids learn to perfect their image early on. Starting in middle school, they’re encouraged to think about their personal brand, to begin “engaging on the platform of your choice,” to decide on their “key content areas,” and ultimately to be, as Google’s curriculum for “digital citizenship” puts it, “Internet Awesome.” Teenagers absorb all of this at the very moment they are figuring out who that self is. It’s not just that social development happens on social media; social media is social development for teenagers. It’s where they learn how to be in the world and it’s not technically even in the world. To perform their lives as much as they live their lives seems to most kids perfectly normal.
— 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet, Pamela Paul
The studio and network would give us notes in the first few seasons where they would say, “We love Jim and Pam so much. It’s such a great story. We just want to make sure that it’s really coming through what Pam is feeling here.” Greg would go, “Yes, great note. Absolutely.” Then he would say, “Yeah, we’re ignoring that,” because what they don’t understand is that after whatever story has played out, if the camera is peeking at Pam from behind a plant, and her eyes just glance up at Jim and linger on him for one second and then she looks away, that intimacy is so tense that the audience will certainly feel the thing we want them to feel.
— Michael Schur (featured in) Scriptnotes, John August and Craig Mazin
