From the Executive Director

My Neighborhood in Cyberspace

By Teresa Eyring

This month marks the fifth anniversary of an important social phenomenon affecting the practitioners, organizations and causes of our industry. Yes, ladies and gents—it’s Facebook, the social networking site that is fast becoming the virtual hangout for theatre people.

The site had its genesis in 2004 as a hobby for Harvard student Mark Zukerberg and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. In its first two years, it was available just to students at Harvard, followed by Yale and Stanford. It soon caught on as a tool for students enrolled in 30,000 colleges and universities as well as high schools. In late 2006—less than three years ago—it was ungated for use by the general public. It feels like old news, but in the grand scheme, it’s still quite new. I just got my own FB profile in 2008, as is the case for many of my colleagues.

FB has become a place where old friends are found, new friends made and international relationships maintained. And not unlike Danny Hoch’s Williamsburg, Facebook operates somewhat like a neighborhood, with day-to-day social interactions that are not generally organized or planned. You run into whom you run into, and it’s often more about the small talk you have on the street than a throw-down with big ideas. In FB’s “What are you doing?” live feed, I read this morning: Gavin Lawrence (Twin Cities actor) “is full of thoughts but not many words.” Michael Halberstam (Writers’ Theatre of Illinois artistic director) “met Filch last night.” Mark Lord (theatre professor from Bryn Mawr College of Pennsylvania) hears “the long, slow whistle of the train as it passes through this backwater town at dawn. And the lamenting bark of the fenced-in dog left behind.” Phil Santora (TheatreWorks of Palo Alto, Calif.’s managing director) is reminded by his body “what happens if you don’t go to the gym for a really long time and then you work out. Ouch.”

While some individual entries are more literary than others, there is an overarching poetry to the sweep of personal testimony appearing by the minute. And the result seems to fill a need that is shared by everyone—a need that, for baby-boomers at least, materialized when people stopped writing letters, dropping by for visits or picking up the phone just to chat. It seems that all generations have a need to know what’s up—and, more specifically, what personal stories matter to their friends, friends of friends, and neighbors.

A colleague who is very new to the tool keeps saying, “I don’t get it, I don’t get it...why do I need to know that this person is eating cookies and that person didn’t sleep last night? What am I supposed to do with that information?” It’s true, to some extent—with the viral potential of a tool such as this one, you might wonder why it’s not more of a hotbed for organizing, for communicating and exploring big ideas, for pronouncements, for calls to action.

This level of discourse does happen in its own way: Last fall, in an act of solidarity with a particular presidential candidate, a large number of our theatre kin changed their FB profiles’ middle names to “Hussein.” Special groups and events have formed around causes ranging from particular productions to financial emergencies at Shakespeare Santa Cruz and the Magic Theatre (as of this writing). And people post important news items or videos that others may not have seen, such as “Countdown” moderator Keith Olbermann’s stirring on-camera monologue following the passage of California’s Prop 8.

At the same time, we are already inundated with news from the mainstream media that can be received in a variety of condensed formats or in aggregator pages. Even when a news story or video is posted on FB, it may provide convenient access—but it is generally not something you haven’t already seen or heard. What you can’t get just anywhere, though, are the bits and pieces of information about what your colleagues are up to individually—what they are thinking about in that moment, no matter how mundane.

In other words, I don’t get to see Phil Santora very often. So while I am interested in hearing about how the economy is affecting his theatre, I also like knowing that he just went to the gym.

Someone once said the Internet is a rip-off of New York City—referring I believe to the unbridled energy, chaos, opportunity and diversity of its contents and residents. In the case of Facebook, what started as a scrappy little online tool, designed in a college dorm room or computer lab, and became the exclusive territory of college students, eventually caught on as a hip, efficient and inexpensive place to connect for everyone. And while some say it’s old news, passé, not efficient, a time-sucker, it also represents a significant new way—a new model, if you will—of communication and networking for our field. Happy birthday, FB!