“For the last year or so, the Theatre Royal [in the English city of York] has not only been asking its audience what they think of their shows – it has invited them to make programming decisions themselves.” Visionari, a group of about 20 (old) Yorkers assembled by Theatre Royal, “[have] attended workshops, met everyone from the artistic director to the graphic designer, and taken responsibility for a week-long festival in the studio.” – The Guardian
Category: AUDIENCE
Designing An Arena Specially For Video-Game Tournaments
The Fusion Arena, a $50 million, 65,000-square-foot venue dedicated to esports, is set to open in 2021 in Philadelphia’s sports district. Primarily, “[it] will host home games for the Philadelphia Fusion, the professional nine-person team in the 20-team Overwatch League, … but the arena will also host occasional outside events.” – CityLab
Last Year’s Most Objected-To Books In Schools And Libraries
The American Library Association’s annual list is out, and as usual, there are some head-scratchers. Harry Potter? To Kill a Mockingbird? The media darling of the list is John Oliver’s parody of the Pence family’s leporine romp A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. – Melville House
Why We Hate Slow Things?
“Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age.” – Nautilus
Big Tech’s War To Dominate The World
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are waging a war of all against all—a war for all of your time, all of your money, all of your worldly interactions and desires. They want to be your one indispensable partner for navigating life, and to get there, they must destroy one another. If the government doesn’t step in, the American public will become collateral damage. – The New Republic
‘Relevance Is Becoming The New Litmus Test’: England’s Arts Funder Will No Longer Give Grants Based Solely On Excellence
“Arts Council England has revealed it will now decide what to fund based principally on how ‘relevant’ it is to audiences – and it will ‘no longer be enough’ to produce high-quality work alone. This was one of 11 points … [that] will be the driving factors for the funding body’s next 10-year strategy.” – The Stage
TV Viewers Are Skipping Ads. So Networks Are Changing Formats
How? Like micro-blocks – short ad breaks that are short enough -15-60 seconds that the networks hope viewers won’t fast forward through them. – Variety
The Music Genre Wars: Does It Matter How You Label It?
In the 1920s, with the creation of the record industry that followed the development of recording technology and the pre-Depression economic boom, genre began to shift from function to demographics of consumption. Genre became, in music industry parlance, format: defined by who was buying and listening to the record. Immediately, this demographic slotting took on explicitly racial dimensions. – Pacific Standard
A Life Without Boredom: The War For Your Attention
The war for your attention is a zero-sum game. If Netflix retains four hours of your day, that’s four hours HBO can’t get. The way for companies to remain competitive is to ensure a never-ending stream of content, which is how we reached the era of content overload. This is how boredom, as a state of existence, died. – OneZero
They Told Us The Digital Revolution Would Make Our Lives Better. It Hasn’t Turned Out That Way
Douglas Rushkoff: “In some ways, we’re all hostage to our technologies, or we’re simply at the mercy of this system. We’re being steamrolled by our devices, and the result is a kind of emotional slavery. And we know that billions of dollars are going into applying everything, every nasty trick we know about behavioral finance, to the digital realm.” – Vox