Hang Your Shingle

Just yesterday I found a list that someone had put together of many, many grammatical and spelling errors in Facebook posts and status updates and their (often cleverly humorous) corrections. One of the most interesting things about the whole list was the number of times the offending writer didn't actually realize they were being corrected - they couldn't see their own errors as mistakes! Then they would get upset when people kept commenting on their posts or status updates with either witty rejoinders or continued corrections. At times, the chains reached nearly epic proportions, fueled almost solely by incredible personal blindness.

I have a theory about theatre, which is that actors SHOULD be the most well-adjusted, socially adept, mentally stable group of people on the planet (yes, I hear you laughing) since their preferred occupation involves free therapy in the form of 'role-playing' and experiencing other people's lives and challenges in as realistic a manner as possible. Every rehearsal, every performance, they have the opportunity to vicariously blow off all kinds of steam and aggravation, to nearly completely understand the full consequences of any set of bad decisions - and then leave it all behind and go home to their 'normal' lives. The strangest part of this theory, really, is that for the most part it just doesn't work. It's as though the world of the theatre, instead of aiding and relating back to the 'real' world (for most actors), actually stands alone and is only dealt with by separating from the 'real' world to enter into the 'theatre' world. This allows actors to refuse to learn anything from the lives that they are portraying on stage, and go on being as neurotic and self-absorbed as they'd like in their non-work lives.

As I said, it's just a theory, and naturally it doesn't apply to every actor.

Likewise, I have a theory that many people are out there treating the Interwebs as though they are a completely separate world, that the things they do and say online have no real bearing on their actual daily lives - which leads to complete shock and non-comprehension when someone takes them to task for simple things like, say, spelling and grammar. It's almost as though online communication doesn't really rely on writing, but rather that the words will rise osmotically from the computer and imbed meaning directly into your brain without needing to stop for things like accepted forms of logical comprehension. It can be really funny to watch.

Consider, though, the number of times you've heard someone get upset over an e-mail - current belief is that much online communication is inferior because it does not allow for body language and other physical cues to carry meaning. While it's true the physical element is missing, what is present is the opportunity to carefully craft messages to distribute the greatest possible meaning. I've never understood how people can 'vent' or 'rant' in an e-mail and then just push 'send' - if you have the chance to tell someone exactly what you think or feel, why would you not take the time to review and edit and make sure you're saying exactly what you mean? I've received e-mails that leave me entirely certain that what was written was not what was meant, but I'm still a little confused since that is what was actually said.

To sum up: Spelling and grammar are important, because they determine just how intelligent other people perceive you to be. If you don't care if people think you're a redneck moron, be aware that you will be seeing comments that make corrections, because your friends are well-meaning or because they think you're too dumb to know they're making fun of you. You either need new friends, or you need to do a quick review of whatever you've typed before you hit 'share'. (Or possibly both.)

One last note: Pay attention to what you really want from your online interaction, or you won't get it. I knew someone once who posted provoking things on his blog, and then reverted to extraordinarily childish behavior when people questioned his statements. I have no problems with a good reasoned debate - when the response is "I didn't want to read what you wrote about what I said because I don't think you're worth my time" you might as well take your ball and go home. The excuse "it's my blog so I'll say what I want to" is completely true, of course, but if you're not willing to let other people respectfully (or not so respectfully, whatever your format) discuss what you've said than the Web is probably not the place for you. Virtual reality is just that - virtual - and it's continued existence depends on the contribution of the community. If you don't at least acknowledge the standards and norms of behavior and communication, you might as well unplug - or go set up your own reality and spend time developing new personalities. Without manners, they're the only ones who will be willing to listen to you.

And by 'listen', I mean 'read'. Duh.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

This post from the Guardian's theatre blog asks about the necessity for theatre practitioners to fully warn audience members about the physical effects of a performance. Interesting question, and something I had not previously considered; I've thought about the kinds of things audiences should be warned about before they engage in a performance, but never that there might be things that will happen as a result of a show and must be dealt with later. To a large extent, changing an audience member's life in some way is an ideal goal of theatre - a related question to the article might be considering how much of that change is deliberately physical, and how much is physical by default. (Again, something I'd never before thought to think about.)

My question for this format is: how might the idea of a physical shift be applied to an online theatre context? Has anyone had an Internet theatre experience that resulted in a recognizable physical response and lingers once the event has finished? How could that idea be incorporated as a target?

I'm thinking of movies and videos that leave me feeling good, energized; that induce a recurrence of that feeling whenever I think about it for next few days. There is a particular song I know that always makes me cry every time I hear it, commercials and video clips that consistently choke me up - the song always takes me by surprise, even when I know it's coming (the videos can at least sometimes be attributed to the fact that I'm a sap). There was a clip that circulated about a... er, 'medical' situation - it turned my stomach, and continues to give a twinge in memory. I think that the theatrical 'change' is ideally more complicated/complex, more intellectual, more interested in affecting behavior rather than triggering tear ducts or a gag reflex - how do those things happen in traditional theatre, and can the same principles carry over into the online performance space?

I'll start looking for Internet performances, and let you know what I find.

Keeping Up With the ... (Insert 'Web' word staring with 'K' here)

I was talking to a friend the other day about the Harry Potter movies (she was laughing at 'you Americans' because I told her I had a ticket to a midnight showing on July 15/16) and I started remembering how I couldn't remember when I started reading the books. I know I pre-ordered the fourth book (and picked it up at 12:08 from the bookstore) but I couldn't tell you when I picked up the first. I'm pretty sure it was when I was working in a bookstore, and I'm fairly certain it was just before the whole series had it's global explosion. (That happened around the third book, right? The first two were well-recieved, but hardly revolutionary. For some reason, everything picked up steam about number three.) I've now got the whole series in hardback, a leather-covered limited edition version of the first book, the British version of the fifth book (also hardback, signed by J.K. Rowling herself), and I own one of the completely over-designed highly exclusive 'Beedle the Bard' 'all the money to charity' books.

What I'm actually wondering here is: how does something go viral? I can't imagine that the takeoff of Harry Potter didn't have something to do with the Interwebs, that there isn't some kind of intuitive technological pulse cycle that, if you hit it JUST RIGHT, means that you literally 'surf the 'Net' to success. When one person links a TED talk on their Facebook page, suddenly three more unrelated (except by me as a 'mutual friend') people post three more completely different talk videos. And it's not regular (like, every other day, or even once a week) it comes in phases. Is there some technology, some software to chart those phases?

I wonder if the instinct for Internet mobility is anything like working the Stock Market. If it's a matter of experience and 'feeling' trends, how can any one person possibly process that much information? It seems like a job that could only be done by computer (ironically). How often does something accidentally go viral, and how often does it require hours upon days upon weeks of carefully feeding the links and information into social networks? My brain is getting queasy just thinking about it.

I'm currently managing (or trying to manage) four blogs, three email accounts, a Facebook page, and a (rather sorry at the moment) website - and I get the feeling that I'm still a complete neophyte. I've got a sudden urge to go re-read 'Beedle the Bard'.

But hey - how often does the word 'neophyte' come up on your Twitter feed? Not often, I'm guessing.

Small consolation, that.

Time

I have this impression that time is soft, malleable, that it will expand (at least slightly) to accommodate by wishes. Even when it doesn't I don't change my vision of time, I acknowledge that I didn't schedule appropriately. Sometimes, though, time is hard and fast and shiny and slippery, and there's nothing I can do to slow it down or push it back. I wish I knew how to see time as non-linear in practice and not just conceptually, for times like this when the website should have gone live 40 minutes ago and it's still not ready and our tech genius is frazzled and there's nothing I can do to help. (I bought Diet Coke. I now know how to clear my browsing history so as to re-test the site. That's... all I've got. FOR NOW.)

When building an interactive theatre-experience website, give yourself at least an extra day to get things up and running. Make sure you do everything possible to de-stress your web designer, and learn Flash and other website-building technology skills (and figure out the ins-and-outs of web hosting/servers). The navigation "tree" is important to let everyone know how things are supposed to work, and having someone nearby to help test and at least a few other computers to upload videos would also be useful (as well as getting other team members trained on video-editing).

It's not that I'd like to go back in time, necessarily - but I would like to 'layer' time and go back to try this first project overlaid with the knowledge I've got now. (In many ways, a second project would be more encouraging, and probably just as educational - once the first experience has worked the bugs/process/methodology out, the second would be the place to explore!)

There is so much to learn. And by my own reasoning, there are at least a couple of websites to build before I can reasonably know what I'm doing. If I had video-taped the original process of building a website, I could play it back while working on the next... It doesn't exactly break time out of it's linear format, but it might be the closest I can come just now...

Hard at work... still...

Tools

I have a domain name.

I don't have a host yet.

I am very susceptible to suggestion - I'll probably (most likely) be purchasing Photoshop.

I ordered a book on website design.

Suddenly, friends are linking to TED talks ALL. THE. TIME. I don't have time to watch everything that looks interesting.

(Ming just gave me a dark-chocolate digestive biscuit. YUM.)

I feel lost, but not too discouraged - I fully believe that everything I'm trying to learn and everything we're talking about in Web Presence will come together and it will all be brilliant (particularly now that I know there are dark-chocolate digestives).

Maybe I should get that new laptop a little sooner than I had thought.

(I'm still not convinced to go Mac, though. My old-fogey flag is flying proudly, if in a slightly counterintuitive direction.)

Communicate/Perform/Talk It Out

I'm a big fan of Scott Adams' blog (he's the creator of the 'Dilbert' cartoons) as he always has something well-reasoned, interesting, and generally funny to say. (I don't always 100% agree with him, but I suspect he'd be happy to hear that.) A recent post discusses 'Acting' - not in a theatre, but in the political arena. It's a little scary, to look at the idea that a key element of political acceptance is not just the way a person presents themselves (Regan, JFK), but also that lying is the norm and it's OK because everyone knows it's a lie.

Scary too if you consider that this new perception could be seen as a result of the Internet - I could be idealizing the past, here, but I think once-upon-a-time the public had to investigate and really trust their elected officials (who in turn felt obligated to uphold that trust) because it took time and considerable effort to check up on their results. Now, it doesn't much matter if we trust those in office (or if we accept from the outset that they will lie to us) because we can almost instantaneously have reported back to us the things they say and do, and if the results are contrary or self-serving we just say "Well, I knew he was going to do that anyway." (Why is Clinton still respected and listened to, again?)

So then we have Facebook and social networking... a few years ago I would have said it was understood that on Internet dating sites the majority of the participants would be 'performing', or 'putting their best selves forward by lying'. Now, considering the continued popularity and usage of such sites, I have to question if that's really the case. How can they successfully connect people if everyone lies? The week's reading seems naive at this point (ironically, only two years after writing - can we get something equivalent to 'dog years' for the Internet?) and I'd be interested in a follow-up and re-write. I see the point, that it's performative in that people will generally try to present themselves in a certain way. I, for example, tend not to update my status with anything depressing or gloomy, even if that's how I 'am'. I will always try to find something funny or clever to say (uplifting as a last resort) because that is how I want to be perceived, which is performative. On the other hand, I would also say that a certain percentage of the online users I'm connected to don't take much thought as to how they're perceived - they use the Internet as a general receptacle for whatever they happen to doing, thinking, or feeling at whatever moment they happen to be doing, thinking, or feeling it. (I'm not involved with Twitter, but from what I understand this could define 95% if everything posted there.) As such I wouldn't call their action performative, any more than a conversation with a group of friends out on the quad is performative. (Which it could be, of course, but usually only among theatre kids.)

There were lots of things I disagreed with in the article, several points I felt were vague and unsupported, and some things that I just guessed could be wrong because they have changed since the article was written. I'm looking forward to the class discussion - and would you look at that, the vehicle for the death of face-to-face interaction giving us even more to talk about!

Inside Out

We keep referring to "authenticity" and the "authentic experience" as if it's a given, particularly in relation to art. What exactly is this authentic experience? Ironically, it seems to me, the article in the link refers to authenticity as the "seeming" of reality. Something is perceived to be real. That's fine - in many ways it's the entire premise upon which theatre performance is based (except when it's deliberately not, of course - but even then it still acknowledges the standing belief of the perception of realness in performance, even as it contradicts it).

Still, why must authenticity (in art, not antiques or jewelry or such) be determined by anything outside of the individual audience? Isn't any experience an "authentic" experience? (How can it be anything else?) Must the experience be entirely judged by the intent of the artist? What if the artist has not made their intent clear? How is authenticity to be determined then?

"Mechanical representation" of a piece of art (Internet, postcard, book, etc...) may make the work more accessible, less exclusive, but it will also make the experience/perception/reception of the art different than it would be in person. Which is to say, why is that experience less authentic? The engagement is with a representation of the art, and the experience should be considered authentic to that type of engagement.


Consider: if a piece of art is designed to be encountered "mechanically", would a "live" presentation then become the mechanical representation?