Much of the discussion seemed to echo wider debates about how the web, the digital society and communications technologies effect relationships amongst individuals and between us and organisations. My friend Peter Bradwell’s work on personal information is helpful here. The main thing that I took from the conversation is that there is nothing inherently good about the use of technology in theatre - it’s more to do with what you want to achieve with it. But there’s nothing inherently good about any approach to theatre. So it’s probably better to start an argument with somebody about what good theatre is, and then argue about how technology does or doesn’t serve that, rather than going toe-to-toe on whether ‘gps/twitter/bluejacking is good for theatre'.  I read a series of conversations with Antonio Negri recently and in it he says that technology + the market is capitalism and that technology + democracy is socialism, which I have found a helpful distinction.

 

I also wanted to briefly reiterate what I was attempting to communicate about how the same set of trends and forces are affecting Think Tanks and the broader dissemination of ideas. There is an old model for the promotion of ideas and it basically goes - 'academic produces idea in university/think tank modifies and publishes it/newspapers reinterprets it as a joke/an accusation/a shocking finding/a ‘political’ story and then people read about it. It’s a good way for letting people know you exist, but as a way of communicating what you were researching or writing about/relaying the idiosyncrasies of human experience, sometimes, quite frankly, it can really suck.. Although blogs and websites have opened up new channels of dissemination, the contemporary think tank is still primarily a broadcaster of ideas - a performer to a fairly passive audience. There’s nothing bad about that, it’s just a fact. Publishing small books with new ideas is a very old, enduring formula and, whatever they write about them, newspapers love them.

 

About five years (before social media really got going) the brilliant headshift redesigned the entire Demos website to be a collaboration platform - all projects had their own blogs, wikis, publicly accessible links and references. After six months of using it the whole thing became completely chaotic - it was impossible for an outsider to work out what Demos was doing. A few years later the site was dumped for a more conventional, attractive website. The failure of the first site could have been to do with those of us who were working at Demos at the time, it could have been because it had serious design flaws - or it could just be because sometimes all the web really needs to do is get things to people faster, rather than to provide a platform for collaboration.

 

This is not to say that the same trends that are affecting theatre aren’t affecting how ideas are developed and disseminated. It’s just most of this is happening beyond think tanks. The web has made it a whole lot easier for people who have ideas to get closer to the people who might want to do something with them. Think Public, Participle and a whole bunch of service and interaction designers are trying to bring ideas together with the public sector and citizens to develop new types service (more). Similarly The Young Foundation is split half-way between researching social problems and founding organisations who can solve them. Perhaps most inspiringly TED has shifted from being an almost masonic annual meeting in Monterey for the tech elite to a global movement to connect people who have ideas with people who can act on them (if he has British citizenship Chris Anderson definitely deserves to be on the honors list!). The massive fringe of TED is now more interesting than the main event. Infact some of the most interesting TEdx events are starting to look more and more like Social Innovation Camp. A Social Innovation Camp is like this highly choreographed workshop that lasts for two days and brings people who want to solve specific social problems with people who can manifest them in websites. Which when you go is a bit like being in a video game. Which is, er, very much like theatre.