a poor player

Dunkirk NY – I am cheating a little again, because rather than reply to Scott’s comment in my post of yesterday, I will make my reply a separate post. For convenience, here is Scott’s reply to Theatre 2.0:

Is this a problem to be solved, choosing one or the other, or a polarity to be managed, maintaining the strengths of both? Theatre 1.0 is not necessarily one-to-many — that is a model that became dominant in the scientific age that led to realism. Web 2.0 is not a many-to-many, really, but rather a your-turn-my-turn medium. Is there anything that stops theatre from doing that, other than this rigid attachment to the idea of the specialist-artist and the consuming-public?

Like you, I am equally drawn to Thoreau and Shirky, but I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. I don’t think…

My reply is that I think it’s an issue to be either solved or managed, and I prefer the second choice, maintaining the strengths of both. To me, it’s one of those issues that, if you don’t find a way to deal with it, then what happens is you get overwhelmed by it. Regardless of whether you view the communication capabilities of the internet as “many-to-many” or “your-turn-my-turn,” the critical question is how will theatre adapt to the realities of the existence of this form of communication? It’s something like how the creators of Google Wave approached their development of Google Wave: what would email look like if it were invented today? Ask the same question about theatre: What would theatre look like if it were invented today?

In addition, to me what’s really critical is the speed at which things change – I think few people, in their thinking and planning, are accounting for the speed at which technology changes. The initial impulse is to solve the problem in terms of the here and now, and not think too much about what your solution will be like 25 years from now in the face of cultural change. It happens everywhere in technology. Look what happened to the music industry when digital technology appeared. Records replaced by cassette tapes replaced by CDs replaced by mp3s replaced by – records (not really, but records are now glowing with the warmth of nostalgia and a niche market has grown up). It all moves fast, and my concern is not so much what this generation thinks, but what succeeding generations will bring to the table in terms of what they have grown up with and what their cultural and technological milieu has been.

For example, I teach stage acting. My students have not grown up with stage acting; they have grown up with movie acting, and I do not teach acting for the camera; in fact, we have no such course here. Students ten years ago were able to keep up with goings-on on Broadway to a limited extent; today they can read Variety and Playbill and can access all sorts of fan sites about their favorite shows and stars. More and more, students are appearing in their freshman year having been more influenced by American Idol and the mega-entertainment fashionable on Broadway rather than the dramatic literature of 60 years ago (or even 10 years ago; these kids do not even know names like Sam Shepard or Neil Labute). Alumni who graduated not 10 years ago comment all the time about the excessive use of the cell phone they see as they walk around campus; it’s the major change they point to. In terms of communicating with my students, it would be better if I could text them all as opposed to using mass emailings, because they do not check their email as frequently as when email was the only form of electronic communication. I text my youngest son all the time because it’s the fastest way to communicate with him, and I do so even to tell him to check his email when I need to send something longer than a text.

What it boils down to for me when I formulate these questions is whether or not the effort in terms of re-thinking theatre is founded on conserving the 1.0 model, or re-shaping a 2.0 model, all the while thinking about what a 3.0 model will look like. At Fredonia we are beginning to have the conversation about creating a 2.0 academic environment, and of course there are the predictable sides being taken: IT people want to preserve the current structure and cite security considerations, while progressive faculty and staff are pushing for adaptation of tools such as Google Apps for Education as replacements for in-house email, WebCT, Blackboard, Angel, and all the other Web 1.0 tools in place. The time it will take to solve all these political issues will be time lost in evaluation and adaptation, and more time lost in planning for the next technological innovation.

For me, Theatre 2.0 has to be an adaptive growth process which grapples realistically with how technology is changing cultural expectations and assumptions, and one which looks ahead as much as possible to the cultural realities of succeeding generations, rather than looking behind in McLuhan’s rearview mirror. -twl

PS – Scott, this is why we need to get on Google Wave!