Regaining Con-troll - with Ana Scotney

Ana Scotney is an actor and storyteller from Te Whanganui-a-Tara ~

Although we know we don't really own our social media profiles, we tend to think of them as relatively safe spaces on which we can explore, curate, collect and be inspired; spaces where we are free to express our creativity, our thoughts, our ideas; spaces where we are in control of which snippets of our lives we share. But what happens when other people start to encroach on these spaces? When others feel entitled to make public judgements about aspects of our personality, our image or our talents? What happens when the tide turns and our profiles no longer feel like safe spaces - because other people are creating our narrative for us? Do we stay present on our online profiles - or do we leave them behind?

In late 2019, I saw a headline in Woman’s Day which read, ‘Why Shortland Street's Ana Scotney was forced to quit social media’. The article suggested that instances of trolling and bullying forced Ana to exit her social platforms, and I initially reached out to her to see if she’d want to unpack that experience further on the podcast - but as we’ll discover in this episode, it’s not just the experience of being reacted to on the internet that made Ana feel wary of the social sphere. For Ana, the social media space in itself just sort of feels a bit uncertain.

In this conversation, Ana shares her thoughts, philosophies and ideas in regards to issues that surround our online realm. We talk about what it was like to be the target of online trolling, and how the lessons she took from it were powerful as opposed to paralysing. We also discuss how difficult it is to maintain and build an online profile when you crave and thrive in an analogue life - especially in Ana's area of acting and performance.

Topics covered include trolls, acting on Shortland Street, intellectual property, online followings as tickets to success, creativity, prank calls and more.

Shownotes:

To connect with Ana or to see some films, music and other bits of ephemera that make up her multi-disciplinary arts practise, check out her website

Tweet your thoughts on this episode to @SelfieReflect

Once we return to Covid-19 Alert Level One in New Zealand, Ana will resume acting in Michelle Savill's debut Feature film Millie Lies Low, of which she plays the titular character. She is one of Basement Theatre's artists' in residence for 2020. With the support of Basement theatre, Ana is using this residency to research and begin devising an epic oral poem in the long form called The Cadence Trilogy. This work seeks to weave together contemporary and ancient forms of story telling to explore themes of place and belonging in Aotearoa today. Ana is making this work alongside Eleanor Bishop and Puti Lancaster. She is developing a short film The Universe From Our Waka with the support of Catherine Fitzgerald. She has aspirations to write a graphic novel one day.