Jeremy Reynolds took a couple of friends to their first symphony concert and sent them home at intermission — and not because they were misbehaving or ill. Here he explains why. (Even intermissions should be shorter, he says.) – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Category: AUDIENCE
How The U.S. Cultural World Is Bracing For Coronavirus
“Ushers in some theaters are wearing latex gloves. Museums are installing hand sanitizer dispensers as if they were pieces of art. Audience members are being told: If you have a cough, please, trade in your tickets and stay home. As the coronavirus spreads in the United States, theaters, museums and concert halls are hyperaware that their establishments could become petri dishes for a virus that is spread person-to-person through respiratory droplets.” – The New York Times
A Backlash To Oversharing Our Lives?
Oversharing just doesn’t look like it did before. Like most things on the internet, it too has become commodified. Where we once divulged, without much thought or artifice, the hardships in our marriages or the frustration of a bad-hair day, now this seems a little cheap and amateurish. Professional influencers make a living from their oversharing. Ours doesn’t look as neat, as well thought-out, as supported. Even our connection to oversharing is controlled, manipulated, and artificial. – Wired
The Very Tricky Art Of Making Five-Minute Series Episodes For Snapchat
Quibi has been getting all the press for its plans to make video series expressly to be watched on smartphones. But Snapchat has been doing that for years, creating 95 Snap Originals (as they’re called) so far. It isn’t easy to do; short running times and vertical screens are only the start of the challenges. – New York Magazine
How The Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum Is Helping The Public Understand Pandemics
“Ebola was not a pandemic, but it created a panic rarely seen in the U.S. It was on the heels of the Ebola mania that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History developed Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, a major exhibition proposed by Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease physician on the frontlines of the epidemic in West Africa. His idea came with the recognition that the public needed a better understanding of how outbreaks of unknown (or unfamiliar) infectious diseases start and spread.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Has YouTube Become A Weapon For Radicalization?
“Look up one thing out of curiosity and YouTube is ever willing to offer far, far more, often getting far more extreme and pushing further out to the extremes, because that is how YouTube works. They have become an organ of radicalisation instead of taking responsibility, for that is the way their algorithms work.” The Guardian
What We Learned From The Madison Square Garden Performance Of “Mockingbird” And 18,000 Kids
Artistic Directors like me have been wringing our hands over the same question for decades. How do we get younger audiences to come to our theatre? How do we engage young people today in our ancient art form? How do we not only hold their attention but excite them enough to want to come back to our theatre? This week, one answer came. And it showed me that maybe we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question. Sometimes we must bring the mountain to Muhammed. – Intimate Excellent
The Soothing, Anti-Prestige, Counter-Programming Of Network TV
Stressed by prestige TV on streaming networks? Hey, here’s the solution: Just go with the networks. “It’s a soft parade of uniformly telegenic people in clothes that always fit perfectly, bantering like aliens who grew up watching only Friends and ER. Nothing bad can happen to me while these sitcoms and dramas are on, twirling through the latest iteration of an ancient dance. Everything is alright, and if it’s not, it’s surely headed for a quick resolution.” – Fast Company
The Rise Of ‘Relaxed Performances’
“What does make a theatre feel like home? Negotiating mobile phones, sweet wrappers and chatty Kathys is a well-documented headache for theatre staff and spectators alike. The academic Kirsty Sedgman … notes: ‘We may say we want audiences to feel at home in the theatre, but we are still not willing to go so far as to let them act like they are at home.’ So can you make everyone feel at home?” – The Guardian
The Experience Economy – It’s More Than The “Product”
“The experience of the product is bigger than the product itself,” said Donald Chesnut, who became Mastercard Inc.’s first chief experience officer in 2019. “It’s everything around it. How well does it work? How does the product feel?” Some 89% of companies employed a chief experience officer or an equivalent role in 2019, up from 61% in 2017, according to research and advisory firm Gartner Inc., which surveyed nearly 400 large companies in the U.S., Canada and U.K. about their customer experience management. – Wall Street Journal