“Critics at newspapers are dying off even faster than print journalism. Theatre critics, film reviewers, A&E editors, and arts writers of every kind have been stripped from dailies and weeklies around the country.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Unlikable Author (Women Don’t Have The Luxury)
“I’ve worked in and around publishing for almost 15 years now; I’ve met countless male writers who are socially careless or even blatantly offensive and who suffer zero professional censure for it. But women don’t often get the luxury of acting that way, not if they want their careers to grow.”
Of Course The Rockettes Should Dance In The Inauguration And Make A Powerful Statement
Someone’s got to heal this divided citizenry. Dance can do this and a nationally televised show presents an ideal platform. The Rockettes shouldn’t perform for Trump (like my friend was forced to dance for Putin), but rather for his supporters. That said, no artist should ever be asked to “tolerate intolerance”; they have a responsibility to challenge it.
Why Florida Librarians Made Up A Fake Patron Who Checked Out 2,361 Books
The goal behind the creation of “Chuck Finley” was to make sure certain books stayed on the shelves — books that aren’t used for a long period can be discarded and removed from the library system.
A Long, Intense And Interrupted Conversation In Jazz In Cuba
“Since the U.S. embargo of Cuba began in 1962, the ability of Cuban and American musicians to travel back and forth has shifted with the political winds. The late ’70s saw a brief but notable loosening of tensions. In 1985, President Reagan took a hard line. In the late ’90s, under Clinton, the doors opened again, especially for artists, to encourage “people-to-people exchange.” George W. Bush reversed that policy. Following a memorable December 2003 engagement by Chucho Valdés at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard jazz club, no other musician living in Cuba played in the U.S. until 2009, when the Obama administration began loosening travel restrictions.”
A Bored Audience Misbehaves, Is Rude. Write Them Off? Or…
How do you know what an audience is really thinking? Polite applause only tells you so much. Lagging ticket sales aren’t precise about cause. Focus groups aren’t reliable. So then there’s this story about millennials’ reaction to an O’Neill play they were attending:
About two scenes into the play, the students began to grumble among themselves. It was clear they felt they didn’t relate to the story. They were bored, and they resented being forced to attend a three-hour play. But instead of leaving the theatre and taking a zero for the assignment, which might have constituted a kind of nonviolent protest, they began speaking and laughing with each other. Some were asked to leave, but those who remained continued to interrupt the performance with chatter and flash selfies, videos, and a laser pointer. One performer was hit in the eye with the beam.
While that audience’s behavior was unacceptable, I wonder whether we might learn something from it. In some ways, the unadulterated responses of those disgruntled, unengaged students may be a gift. As theatremakers and educators, we have an immense responsibility to deal with this demographic in particular, for they are the next generation of audiences who will—or will not—attend shows created by the next generation of theatre artists.
We might see that disrupted O’Neill performance as a call to reexamine the invitation we extend to student audiences—to question our programming choices as well as our motivations for assigning performances to students in the first place. In short, it can be an opportunity to ask ourselves: What do we gain, and what do we lose, when we invite the next generation of theatregoers into our theatres?
But it’s not just student audiences. How are artists to understand the impact of and engagement with their work if audiences aren’t honest in their responses? Even if those responses aren’t polite. Which is not to say that artists should have to accept laser pointers and selfies. But a decision to write off such behavior and such audiences is a choice to define the conditions and context in which our work needs to be seen. Which is fine. As long as we’re clear about what they are.
How To Hack Attention When The Attention Economy Is Where The Power Is
Sometimes a random alignment of stories unexpectedly congeals around a topic. Like today. We found serval stories exploring the idea of how ideas spread. This Lit Hub story discusses the inherent trap of superficiality of translations.
Translators themselves can be said to traffic in words, sounds, images, and more; whether what is trafficked is tangible or intangible, it’s implied that what is bought, sold, and bartered is in any case commodified. When we think about traffic we also inevitably think about congestion, about impediments to smooth circulation—of vehicles, of course, but also, by extension, of ideas and things. While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication.
This Smithsonian piece explores the sharing of scientific knowledge. English is the international language of science, but because of it, a lot of ideas don’t get the play they should.
More than half of the non-English papers observed in this study had no English title, abstract or keywords, making them all but invisible to most scientists doing database searches in English. “I think this issue is actually much larger than many people think,” Tatsuya Amano says.
But perhaps the most fascinating story is this by Danah Boyd who talks about thinking about information and power as something to be hacked. Don’t work inside the structures of the traditional information economy, figure out ways to hack the power structures – if the currency is attention, then figure out how to hijack attention and get everyone talking about what you want them to talk about.
Indeed, over the last 15 years, I’ve watched as countless hacker-minded folks have started leveraging a mix of technical and social engineering skills to reconfigure networks of power. Some are in it for the fun. Some see dollar signs. Some have a much more ideological agenda. But above all, what’s fascinating is how many people have learned to play the game. And in some worlds, those skills are coming home to roost in unexpected ways, especially as groups are seeking to mess with information intermediaries in an effort to hack the attention economy.
How Our Campaign For Media Literacy Might Have Eroded The Truth
“In the United States, we believe that worthy people lift themselves up by their bootstraps. This is our idea of freedom. What it means in practice is that every individual is supposed to understand finance so well that they can effectively manage their own retirement funds. And every individual is expected to understand their health risks well enough to make their own decisions about insurance. To take away the power of individuals to control their own destiny is viewed as anti-American by so much of this country. You are your own master. Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is ‘do the research’ for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real.”
Free Speech? As An Idea It Requires A Few Rules…
“The main schism in today’s free speech debates pits liberals, advocating unbridled speech as a tool of freedom, against radicals, who unmask unbridled speech as a tool of class privilege. But that rift tells only one story. In almost all democracies today (the United States being the sole and oft-criticised exception), mainline liberal doctrines overwhelmingly require limits on provocative speech.”
Here’s How You Hack Mainstream Attention And “Reconfigure” Power
“Running campaigns to shape what the public could see was nothing new, but social media created new pathways for people and organizations to get information out to wide audiences. Marketers discussed it as the future of marketing. Activists talked about it as the next frontier for activism. Political consultants talked about it as the future of political campaigns. And a new form of propaganda emerged.”