Must Read for the Day

Andy @ Culturebot has posted an insightful essay on the value of live performance in a culture that is becoming more permeated by technology .

Deep Reading and the Fetishization of Live Experience

...people will become alternatively literate. They will be able to create and interpret visual and aural media with ever-greater ease; and “deep reading” – the ability to created and process complex sentences and complicated trains of thought, to construct and deconstruct reality through semantics and semiotics and convey your findings – will wane. Without the words to describe nuanced states of emotion or states of being, without the words to convey complicated thoughts, those thoughts and emotions might vanish. Or they may only be the province of those who can process them. The vast majority of people will become subject to only the roughest and broadest stimuli, they will respond only to the most obvious sensations and react with the broadest, simplest emotions.

In the most basic equation this means that audiences for unmediated live performance may very well diminish, at least as we offer those experiences in the current context. Big Broadway shows and middlebrow entertainment that offers easily digestible experiences will face one set of challenges but truly challenging live performance will be facing an almost existential threat as audiences wither and vanish.

This only sounds grim because it reflects some of the challenges we're facing right now. But I find inspiration in the latter part of the essay which discusses the opportunities we have for exploring narrativity and presentation.