The term Fourth Wall is often used to describe the boundary between an audience and actors in both theatre and film, represented by the edge of the stage and the screen respectively. I think this idea can be extended to the web, where the user’s screen or browser forms a barrier between them and the content they are viewing. Importantly, since the advent of Web 2.0, and increased user participation in website content, the Fourth Wall of the web has begun to erode.
Usually the Fourth Wall serves to allow the audience to remain voyeuristic watching the story unfold before them with a conceptual or physical boundary keeping them from participating in the action or becoming part of the plot.
This works both ways, actors rarely escape the screen or address the audience directly, with notable exceptions such as pantomime (oh, yes it is...) and boundary crossing films like Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, where actors leave the screen and participate in real life adventures and romance albeit safely from within a movie.
The web has its own Fourth Wall breakers these days, with some sites driven almost exclusively by user content such as Facebook and the many ‘blog’ sites available today. By uploading their own content users have broken through the Fourth Wall and are writing the sites to suit themselves. But what about the reverse proposition where sites have broken through the Fourth Wall and become part of the ‘real’ world?
It would be possible to argue that the curious phenomenon of celebrity Twitter posts (Tweets) appearing in the local newspaper is an example; a print medium sourcing its content exclusively from an online source. Or maybe the more traditional EDMs are an example, where the website reaches out to you (or at least your inbox) enticing you to return.
But maybe it hasn’t really happened yet, it might take yet another leap forward, such as 3D web with interactive avatars, before we can truly say that websites have broken through the Fourth Wall. Watch this space.