Welcome to episode 221 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!

As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:

http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast

In this episode, I’d like to expand on some of the ideas I explored at the end of the previous episode, Part 2 of my interview with Jamieson Price. If you haven’t listened to it already, I would suggest you check out both parts of his interview, as well as episode 204 of the podcast entitled, “Go Hunting for the Best Acting and Storytelling”. While those episodes are not required for you to appreciate this one, they can offer you important context for the concepts I’m going to address here.

One of the big pieces of advice that Jamieson gives to his acting students is to go out and live life. In the previous episode, I defined “living life” as maximizing the interactions you have with other human beings by participating in their emotional lives as well as engaging with their ideological beliefs. These life experiences are what an artist draws upon in order to bring authenticity and believability to their artistic creations. Having diverse and enriching life experiences can help broaden your expressive capabilities as a creative in any field.

In the past, living life usually meant getting out of your house and interacting with people and with the world around you. The further away from home you got, the more likely it would be for you to have new and unique experiences that you hadn’t encountered before. It was as if reality was a random experience generator that increased in novelty the more you explored it, like opening up new areas on a map in a video game.

While this can still be the case, a new factor has been added to modern life, the world of online algorithms. Platforms like social media sites and even media streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify, analyze your behavior online and try to guess what you might like next based on your clicks, likes, comments, watch time and other points of data. The ultimate goal of these platforms is to keep you engaged with them in order to fully monetize your attention. It’s even been revealed that certain dating apps can employ algorithms whose goal is not always to find you the perfect match, but instead to provide slight mismatches so that you’ll stay engaged with their platform longer, as you continue to look for a more satisfying romantic partner. The financial pressure on these algorithms to curate your experiences so that you won’t leave their respective platforms is immense.

These algorithms also affect real life interactions and shape society in ways we still don’t fully understand. Social media sites can affect not only who we believe we are and who we choose to interact with both online and in real life, but also how we behave when interacting with them. Online algorithms have changed dating and relationships, and also how we relate to family, friends, and perceived foes. We form opinions based on repeated impressions gathered from social media, and algorithms influence the frequency of exposure to certain mindsets. We may believe or disbelieve anything we see online, which then can affect our behavior not only socially, but politically as well. Online interactions can and often do set the tone for in-person interactions. The online world and the real world are no longer separate territories. They overlap constantly and cross-pollinate, in an ever-shortening news cycle of action and reaction, feeding off one another and often spiraling into absurdity. It’s a constant challenge just to maintain one’s equilibrium in the online battle for our attention spans and engagement.

As our lives are managed more and more by algorithms tuned to maximize this engagement, randomness in our everyday interactions is greatly reduced. The algorithm wants to give us something just slightly different from what we had before, but not too different or it risks losing our attention. It wants to keep us on its treadmill so it can make money off of us, and this diminishes the possibility of truly random experiences.

I want to suggest that it’s time to add some randomness back into our lives, both as artists, and as human beings! One of the best ways to do this is to break out of your habitual patterns of behavior. We can become so lulled into submission by the algorithms that provide us with entertainment and other inputs, that we can lose the personal impetus to reach for something new and different. One way to break this pattern of hypnosis is to make a decision that is completely the opposite of what you would normally choose. Do you always go left at a certain intersection? Why not go right this time, and find out what’s down that street you always skip? Do you always pick the same thing off the menu at a certain restaurant? Why not choose something radically different this time, and see what you think? Have you always watched or listened to a certain show, piece of music, or even the same podcast you always go to? Why not explore the kind of entertainment that you might normally ignore or even avoid? What would be the harm in that? If you try an episode of a show that is completely foreign to you, and you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep watching it, but if something in it does intrigue you, you may develop an appreciation for something the algorithm would never have chosen for you, if you hadn’t decided to be different on purpose.

Breaking your habitual patterns of behavior brings an important element back into your life, and it’s called “serendipity”. The serendipitous experience is the one that you were not expecting, and never could’ve planned for, but somehow turns out to be extremely enlightening or beneficial in some way. Our online algorithms tend to limit the chances for a true serendipitous experience, and I’m going to take this episode to explain why I think breaking out of your habitual patterns, and inviting serendipity back into your life is so very important for you at this time, both as a person and as an artist.

Download Voice Acting Mastery Episode #221 Here (MP3)