From the Executive Director
Only Connect
By Teresa Eyring
At the Association for Performing Arts Presenters' town hall meeting in New York City in January, presenters wrestled with the desire of audiences—predominantly but not exclusively younger ones—to be digitally and Internet-ically connected at all times. The debate centered on whether audiences should be allowed, if not encouraged, to turn their cell phones on—to text, tweet, Foursquare and send Facebook updates during a show. For the most part, town hall participants lamented the distraction of such devices for artists—and the loss for audiences themselves, who by using those devices forgo the opportunity to fully concentrate and reflect on the performance. A few presenters divulged that they're already addressing what they consider to be the inevitable: They're making accommodations for social media multi-taskers by creating special sections in their theatres for attendees who wish to keep their cell phones on. (Click here for an article by Eliza Bent on how some Pennsylvania arts organizations are using texting as an audience-engagement tactic.)
Not that everyone will or should jump on that bandwagon. In TCG's own recent highly unscientific FB poll, only 4 out of 40 responders saw any merit in allowing texting in the theatre. The rest were horrified by the very idea!
Meanwhile, instant micro-blogging continues to gain footing as a way to dip in and out of the places and conversations that not everyone can physically attend. In 2007, TCG used Twitter for the first time to connect all staff members working the National Conference in Minneapolis. The technology was less than a year old, and it was not adopted widely until a couple of years later. By the 2009 National Conference, attendees merrily tweeted while remote friends followed along. In recent months, Arena Stage's Defining Diversity and Black Playwrights convenings were reported on Twitter by some of the blogosphere's most influential theatre writers, and in some cases those tweets were followed by more substantive blog posts. August Schulenburg, a TCG staffer and playwright, experimented with covering these events on behalf of TCG. (You can read about it on www.twitter.com/tcg.)
There are some real positives in this trend toward instant updates and reporting through Twitter and other social media. It creates a sense of real-time connectedness to people, conversations, events and performances that you might have been missing. It also promotes a sense of community and friendship with people you might not otherwise meet, which can lead to live interactions. Early this year, Trendwatching.com reported on a trend called Mass Mingling. "The more people date and network and Twitter and socialize online, the more likely they are to eventually meet up with friends and followers in the real world. Why? Because people actually enjoy interacting with other warm bodies, and will do so forever," the site proclaimed. If true, this trend may well be leveraged for benefit of live theatre.
On the not-so-positive side, studies have long concluded that, much as we like to think otherwise, the brain can actually only process one stream of information at a time. Last year at Stanford, researchers conducted tests to understand whether media multi-tasking in the classroom—which is increasingly permitted—negatively impacts learning. The answer is yes. Researchers say, "People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time." In other words, in such situations very smart people lose their ability to filter out irrelevant information.
Another study relating to society at large, done by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in January of this year, says that children ages 8 to 18—the M2 (or "media 2") generation—are on average exposed to nearly 11 hours of media every day, an increase of 2 hours since 1999. In this case, media includes TV, music, computers, video games and print. The study tracks usage of mobile devices as modes of delivery but does not count the use of devices for texting and phone conversations, which would add to those 11 hours. A significant portion of the time is spent "media multi-tasking," including with homework. The study shows that only 51 percent of heavy media users receive good grades, versus 66 percent of light media users.
This is a complex issue that will be with us for a long time. Clearly, theatres have a tremendous opportunity for community-building and connectivity through social media—but this opportunity is not without risks. And many will continue to believe that the theatre should remain the quiet place that acknowledges the brain's true talent for focusing on a one thing at a time.
DJ Spooky, in his comments at APAP's opening plenary session, quoted author William Gibson, who said, "The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed." This quote resonated wildly, and was tweeted and re-tweeted during the conference. It was tweeted again at Arena Stage's Black Playwrights Convening the following week. Some three weeks later, the quote was still circulating, either without attribution or credited to people other than Spooky or Gibson. One Twitterer in Canada wrote: "Cool quote from the agency president today…the future is already here…etc."
The funny thing is, Gibson apparently first made that statement 11 years ago in an interview on National Public Radio. The distribution of the future, even on Twitter, is still catching up.
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