Act 3: Like now Twitter people

Wordle visualization of the twitter posts from the #apollo twitter experiment

When we went out into the lobby for the first intermission, #apollo was the number one trending term on Twitter.  I have to admit, that was a heady feeling.  I also found out that i knew a couple of the other twitter people through mutual friends - a fact they pointed out when all of a sudden two unrelated people they knew started twittering about some mysterious thing called #apollo.  okay, that was cool.  i also noticed little trends in the posts - oh, hey, that’s cool, that person said “meta” at the same time I did.  oh, interesting, a bunch of people were saying how good the lighting is! - that were pleasing to me as someone participating in the event.

Looking back, though, at the posts themselves I suspect what one sees is just a big mess.  Heck, I was at the play and can barely bring myself to do more than just skim them.  It seems to me that Twitter is interesting and useful in the moment but perhaps not especially useful retrospectively and for people not involved in the event at hand.

I’m really hoping that PCS puts together some sort of response or analysis about what they got out of the event. Did the posts provide them with any insight about the play and their production of it? Did they learn something about how audiences think during a performance or does it seem as trivial to them as it does to me? I should revise that and say, having seen the play now, I bet it would be kind of cool to sit back and see the posts rolling in, just to watch the play unfolding in this really abstracted way.

For my own part, using twitter during the play definitely altered my experience of the play in some semi-interesting ways. I definitely felt distracted by the act of posting during the play and, on some level, that distanced me from the play. On the other hand, I think my constant “checking in” combined with my desire to be positive about the play in posts actually made me engage more emotionally with the play. I was responding to it much more moment-by-moment than I would have been if I was just watching it. I think it’s even possible that I would have gotten bored by the antics of the play if I hadn’t been posting about it. I’m not sure. Finally, and I think this is most interesting, I was very reluctant to shift into a mode where I was willing to criticize the play. Usually with 24 hours I start to feel a desire to think critically about what I’ve seen. I think posting throughout served to sort of solidify the positive, emotional (vs. intellectual) response I was having to the play. And, interestingly, I think as an emotional piece Apollo is extraordinarily effective. In a lot of ways it doesn’t doesn’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny, though. My posts made me feel committed to and attached to the play in a way that I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t, in a sense, been a participant.

As a brief aside about the play, there were some empty seats there on saturday night, and there probably shouldn’t be. It was a really flawed work but, i think, quite worth seeing. For me, seeing this play, with its themes of the dominance of science and the subjugation of african-americans, in the closing days of the most virulently anti-science administration this country has probably ever known and on the nearly literal eve of the swearing in of our first black president was profoundly moving to me. Some complained that the play was, at its core, merely a history lesson. And, I actually don’t totally disagree with that. I guess I don’t see the harm in a history lesson, especially one told with that kind of verve, beauty, and technical virtuosity.