Slashdot Mirror
Live Tweeting the Symphony?
Lasrick writes "Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard describes desperate attempts to engage with younger audiences on the part of arts organizations who are scrambling to make their productions more interactive. But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage? Quoting: 'Not surprisingly, many performers and older patrons of the arts hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young. But thankfully, the debate over participatory art needn’t devolve into a depressing bout of intergenerational warfare. The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?'"
I don't think the "younger generation" (read: damn kids) necessarily need interactivity. Although they don't watch TV much, they still watch a lot of video. Although they play games, they have an unprecedented tolerance for cutscenes. Just because they tweet all the time does not mean you need to have the tweetstream intertwine with the Now that you present.
What places like the symphony need are simply content that is more relevant to those they want to attract. It's hard to sell traditional symphonic material to younger crowds, so provide that but also a bit of more contemporary stuff.
They've already been doing that in a limited way with movie scores. An more advanced form of this is the rock band Guster, who is going around to a few select cities and playing many favorite songs that have been re-cast to work with the full symphony playing. The results are spectacular.
That way you get younger listeners to understand why you might want to attend a full symphony, and will probably get them to attend more events. But you have to get them interested first.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage?"
I know this is Slashdot, and I'm going to take a leap and say most folks here aren't in the performing arts, but I am, and your comparison is a false one. A live-tweeting audience member isn't necessarily engaged with the performance, but more importantly, audiences seldom sit silently and stare at the stage. The whole point of live performance is that the audience provides instant feedback to the performer and vice versa, and to each other. Some of the most energetic audiences of Shakespeare plays are teens (or younger children) who haven't learned to loathe the classics yet. The real question is what do audiences and performers gain by adding interactivity via twitter (et al) to the mix vs. what is lost.
I'll float out there that, in many circumstances, phones and other wireless devices can cause interference with wireless microphone and backstage comm systems, so asking audiences to turn of their devices is a matter of ensuring that we don't get noise through AV systems. This will not affect all circumstances, of course, but it is a hard-deck restriction in many.
Is sustained focus even possible in mass audiences anymore? If not, what have we lost?
As an associate professor at the university, I can tell you many students have lost sustained focus, even in very small groups. If an explanation takes longer than 5 minutes, you lose them. If a problem takes longer than 5 minutes to solve, you lose them too. Starting 2 years ago, I modified all my lectures to have like "breakpoints" very often, so that no-one gets lost.
However, I think we already lost the Cartesian approach to breaking problems into smaller tasks. If you give them a rather simple but big problem, very few students are able the break it down and solve each part. Most will just try a global solution for a few minutes, then try the internet for a global solution, and finally get bored and say it's too complicated. One of my hypotheses is that the internet permits to solve most of the problems instantaneously, so you don't need sustained attention anymore. For the few cases where it is needed, well, that's the difference between the elite and the others...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
This isn't a movie. These are real human beings performing in front of you, for you. Have some decency and be there instead of connecting to someone somewhere else. And GTF off my lawn!
I think Jacobs doesn't understand the economics of the performing arts. The performing arts are largely a legacy of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Symphonies, like theater troupes and opera companies, depend on patronage to survive, not the box office. Ticket prices for a given performance are set high enough to keep the riff-raff out, with the gap between the production costs and the box office being closed by wealthy patrons. For a symphony to survive, they would be better served to figure out how to keep and increase their patronage, not their audience. Wealthy people aren't always motivated by the lure of profit (they are already wealthy, after all) but being recognized by their wealthy peers as a patron of the arts does have value. That is what symphonies should try to exploit, the enhanced social standing that those performances provide to their wealthy patrons. I guess a case could be made for attracting the children of their wealthy patrons, but that is decidedly not the same case as attracting the children of the riff-raff that are already structurally excluded on purpose.