Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank is a structural microcosm of the playwright’s famous view that ‘All the world’s a stage’ (As You Like It). Replicating the Elizabethan playhouse, round and roofless, ‘this wooden O’ (Henry V) is both intimate and exposed to the sky, making any production on its stage both situated and seemingly boundless in its reach.

To imagine the real globe - our Earth - as a macrocosmic theatre, is to imagine each human being not merely existing or living, but engaged in the daily performance of their own life and self. In our globalised and digitised age, selfhood is mediated through a world of technology, with the Internet as the ‘O’ of our time.

Social media came of age during my time studying Shakespeare. In those years I became fascinated by how Twitter and Facebook function as digital playhouses in which people fashion and perform their identities for others. This observation was both an epic distraction and a singular postmodern education, as I theorised how digital rhetoric, in the form of crafted messages and staged images, misleads as easily as it captivates its audience.

As a reflection on that dramatic education, I wrote the following on the value of social media in our time. I called it ‘O’ in honour of the experience, which was Shakespearean in magnitude.

In the aftermath
You calculate
The losses and the gains,
And what is left over.
The remainder is not a measure
Of any force or substance.
It is not memories,
Or wisdom,
Or scars.
It is the space
Carved out of the inside,
Where the feelings and the faces
Were gathered
Into their units.
They are gone now,
If they were ever even there.
They were subtracted,
Taken away,
Replaced with circling air
And looping layers
Of time.
You learn not to live
In the sphere,
But to carry it forward
Until you recognise
What you will use
To fill it.
And when you find it,
You add it,
And you make it
Solid again
With the sum.