This Week’s Insights: Screens have taken over the audience… The science of predicting movies that hit big… Should the audience have a bigger role in the art?… Purposely making theatre that divides people… Tech is disrupting philanthropy by redefining its audience.
- What Orwell Got Wrong About Video Screens: In “1984”, video screens were the intrusive presence that pumped out the up-is-down messages of Big Brother that helped to keep the population in line. Skip to now: “What’s most striking about the telescreen’s ubiquity is how right and how wrong Orwell was about our technological present. Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives. We interact digitally so often and in such depth that it’s hard for many of us to imagine (or remember) what life used to be like. And now, all that interaction is recorded. Snowden was not the first to point out how far smartphones and social media are from what Orwell imagined. He couldn’t have known how eager we’d be to shrink down our telescreens and carry them with us everywhere we go, or how readily we’d sign over the data we produce to companies that fuel our need to connect. We are at once surrounded by telescreens and so far past them that Orwell couldn’t have seen our world coming.”
- Science Can Now Predict A Hit Movie: “After analyzing data from 6,147 movie scripts and filtering it through a series of algorithms, the researchers have identified the emotional arc that makes the most money, called the ‘man in a hole’ arc.” Question is: are these kinds of algorithms predictive of future audience behavior? Tastes change, trends evolve, and audiences are influenced by access to a wider universe of content than ever before. And while an algorithm might be predictive of mainstream popularity, can it analyze for the out-of-the-blue artistic inspiration that upends conventional wisdom? Be Smart: There are many attempts right now to quantify impact and engagement as a measure of quality. It’s a counter to the basic measures of popularity we’ve traditionally used (books or tickets or albums sold), but the jury is still out on how to define “quality” in a universal metric.
- Lyn Gardner Suggests A Change In The Artist/Audience Contract: The theatre critic suggests a new approach to criticism, one that envisions a new role for the audience: “A new approach to theatre criticism, in which theatres see developing critical voices as part of audience and artist development and invest in it accordingly in terms of both time and money, is needed. … Particularly when The Stage survey indicates that word of mouth and friends is a more trusted source of opinion than mainstream publications. Could audiences be those friends too?” It could be building a better audience, better in the sense of asking more of that audience in articulating response and committing to more sophisticated interactions…
- Is There An Audience For Divisive Theatre? Rather than see theatre as “a community of people who already share the same system of values and go to the theatre to confirm it”, Croatian director Oliver Frljic instead seeks “to create conflict with the audience, to divide them and so reaffirm their uniqueness”, not unity. And then there’s the framing, where the broader social context is as important as what takes place on stage – the protesters need to understand that they too are a part of it, that the show starts and ends long after the actual performance itself.
- Tech Is Now Disrupting The “Audience” For Philanthropy: It was inevitable that the smart people who have disrupted vast sectors of our world would turn their attentions to philanthropy. “Silicon Valley companies transformed the way we shop, search for information, connect with friends, and consume entertainment. The people who made millions or billions from these companies are now changing yet another sector of the American economy: philanthropy. They’re forcing nonprofits to become incubators and disruptors, rather than just service providers, and to think about how they sell themselves, how they measure what they do, and what programs will attract money.”
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