Comments on: Live Twitter Feed from Portland Center Stage Performance

By: First New York Theater Bloggers Social | DENNIS BAKER LLC

First New York Theater Bloggers Social | DENNIS BAKER LLC — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:57:15 +0000

[...] More and more people seem to want to enter the dialogue of where theater and social media can meet. In the recent issue of American Theatre magazine Diana Paulus talks directly about how American Repertory Theatre is going to work with social media. What do you think about Paulus’ comments? Does it seem like it is taking the next step from the live twitter feed that happened at Portland Center Stage? [...]

By: Carmen Hill

Carmen Hill — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:18:47 +0000

I participated in the live twitter of #apollo Saturday night and have a couple of thoughts… I get where @londontheatre is coming from, but I don’t think that would have been practical. It was all I could do to pay attention to the action on the stage and hope that my fingers were on the right keys. Answering questions would have been asking too much and would have taken al the fun out of it. Plus, I think the nature of Twitter is that it is very individual and stream of consciousness. Have “an assignment” would kind of kill it. That doesn’t mean all the tweets were super insightful or valuable to someone following from the outside. It was a unique way to experience theater and share the experience. I enjoyed going back later and seeing what my fellow tweeters had said about the performance at various points. One other note: twitter isn’t really a channel for young people. It’s more the thirty-somethings and over who are most active. Teenagers share via text message and Facebook (and MySpace, still, to some extent). When we told our 20-year-old son that we were going to be “live tweeting” from Apollo, he said, “God, you guys really are a couple of dorks.”

By: Lindsay Price

Lindsay Price — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:42:52 +0000

I think this is an interesting concept that’s not quite right yet. I hope they don’t give it up. It could be that link to theatre younger viewers need. And then on the other hand does it take away from the experience to be focused on the tweet and not on the stage…. I’m on both sides of this!