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?'"

Comments

Key is relevance, not interactivity...

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Key is relevance, not interactivity...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Teens rebel against the older generation, rejecting everything they stand for, and that's a normal and natural phase in their development.

No, it's not. Maybe in your culture it is, but the rest of the world finds it bizarre. Other languages lack the "teen" suffix to the numbers 13-19 so they don't even know what a "teenager" is. Plenty of older children the world round are well-behaved and wish nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of their parents.

Re:Key is relevance, not interactivity...

[sycodon]

Umm...you don't pay Beethoven or Mozart because they have a copyright. You pay the Dallas Symphony for the performance...their work...it's their job to play music.

Sustained focus

[lorinc]

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...