 Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Gary's in the back hugging everyone. Hi everybody, we're going to get started. Oh, that was loud. Welcome to the Dramanus Guild's second national conference. I'm Seth Coderman. I'm the manager of online media at the Dramanus Guild. Today we're going to talk about new media, what it is, how it affects us, and ultimately how to harness the resources that are available. Guinean is going to start us off, and I'll introduce him in just a moment. Then we'll talk. We'll have a discussion about all of this new media stuff. And then we'll open up to questions in the room and to our audience online. So if you're watching us live on HowRoundTV, tweet to us using hashtag, say DG or new play. Guinean, cover your ears. It's my pleasure to introduce Guinean Sullivan. I knew Guinean long before we ever had the chance to meet through his blog, and I have a great deal of respect for him. First and foremost, he's a playwright. His plays include Reels, The Butcher, Hot and Cold, Abstract Nude, Constellation, Let X, The Faith Killer, Cracked, and The Great Dismal. He's a founding member of The Welders in DC. He contributes to HowRound, 2 AM Theater, Adaptistration, The Dramatist, staged directions all on top of writing for his own blog and being incredibly active on social media. I'm sure most of you have met him already through Twitter. For 15 plus years, he's been a communication strategist, consulting arts and cultural organizations, nonprofits, federal government agencies. He's also the newly appointed project director for the National New Play Network's New Play Exchange and is the Dramatist Guild Regional Rep for DC. Aside from all of that, Guinean I think is one of the smartest, most passionate, and sincere guys I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. And frankly, I would jump at any opportunity to sit in a room and chat about new media with him. So I'm just as anxious to have the session today. And with all of that said, I will throw it over to you. Hi. I want to start by, this is the moment in the performance where somebody usually tells you to turn off your cell phone. Or if you're at, you know, a relatively open-minded new media organization, you might get told, hey, leave your cell phone on and tweet about whatever you see. And I'm going to say a third thing. Make a choice. Do whatever you like. Put your cell phone on. You want to tweet about what you see. You want to follow along the chat that's happening on Twitter while we're in here. You want to Facebook about something. You want to take my picture and post it. Please just wait until I'm not picking my nose. But if you want to shut it down and you want to, you know, use that as a way to help you pay more attention to what's happening in the room, that's great too. You know your own mind better than I do. You know how your mind works better than I do. So make a decision for yourself. And I support whatever you do. So title of the event today is a little bit misleading. We're not really here to talk about social media. What we're here to talk about is the ways in which the governing metaphors by which we organize human culture are changing. Now, I want to acknowledge an intellectual debt now because some of you may have already recognized my little illustrations here and know where I'm going. I have an intellectual debt I want to pay to Steven Johnson. Has anyone read Steven Johnson in this room? If you have not read, everything bad is good for you. I highly recommend it. But the book in particular from which I drew a ton of my inspiration is called Future Perfect. It's about the shift to peer network culture in the United States really worldwide. And so that's a lot of where this comes from. All right, I'm going to walk you through each of these three images and then we're going to talk about what they mean and where they're coming from. The very first image on my right is an abstracted map of the Paris train system as it was first built. Really efficient, they thought. If you lived anywhere out in the suburbs of Paris, you could get into the city center. It served everyone's needs. Unless you're this person and you need to get here, it's actually the very least efficient possible system. This would be a lot more efficient. And yet this hub and spoke model, you'll hear me talking about that a lot, actually became incredibly popular and got replicated all around the world. Every train system originally looked something like that. It skipped from trains to airlines. This is a map of how airlines were constructed in the United States. There were major hubs for each airline and they traveled to nearby cities and you could connect from one hub to another hub and radiate out to the local places from there. Now this map also happens to be a map of the way AT&T originally planned its switchboards. So if you wanted to place a telephone call from Boulder, Colorado to Tempe, Arizona, you went from Boulder to the main switchboard that connected you to somewhere else that connected you to Tempe and from the Tempe switchboard you went to a local residence. This is how traffic moved through the telephone networks. This is the way we thought in the 20th century. This is the way we built and designed everything. Welcome to the 21st century. This is essentially, among other things, a map of how bits of data are transported through the internet. Each node in what's called a distributed peer network because any two nodes are peers with one another. Each node knows the basic rules for interacting with the nodes nearest to it. And that's it. So if you send an email from here to here, the email can be split up into tiny fragments, follow a million different paths, and when it gets to its destination, become reassembled and magically appear in your inbox. The burden of sending that message from here to here is distributed throughout the network. And all it needs is a set of rules to govern the connections between any two peers in the network. This is the 21st century. So now, this is the shift, this is the cultural shift that we are all living in right now. This is affecting everything we do. This is the move from multinational corporations with big hierarchies to nimble, non-hierarchical startups innovating on the edges of technology and culture. This is the move from centralized government bureaucracies, big, big bureaucracies, to decentralized, leaderless revolutions. This is the United States government. This is the Occupy movement. This is any government in the Middle East and this is Arab Spring. This shift is happening and we are all caught up in it. This is television broadcast. You have local networks, you have major national networks, and they are broadcasting out and wide to the communities around where they're located. This is cell phone cameras, iMovie, and YouTube. This is anyone is a broadcast network as soon as they want to be. You just need to know the rules to govern your exchange with the peers in your network. This same metaphorical shift is affecting not only all the things in the culture worldwide, but the ways in which we communicate and the ways in which we make theater, the ways in which we work as playwrights. We are moving from a one-to-many world where communication is about, I speak and you listen, to a world in which we have a one-to-one exchange whenever we can or a one-to-few, and instead of I talk you listen, the governing ethos for audiences is I want to participate. I want to join in. I want to create culture with you. I'd like to talk about how there are young audience members now, people who are buying theater tickets, who have essentially never been thinking people in a world in which the internet didn't exist. In the internet, you create a narrative by the click choices you make. You don't absorb a narrative. You say I go here and then this happens to me. I go here and then this happens to me. I choose this. I customize this and then this happens. It's a give and take. This is deeply embedded in the cultural consumption modes of young audiences. They want a theater that is participatory. Instead of a fourth wall surrounding this node or surrounding a stage, we don't have immersive theater. You walk in, you play with things, you interact with actors. You shout when they tell you to shout. You take a prop and wrap it around your head because they told you to do that as I did in a fringe festival show in D.C. earlier this year. Replacing the fourth wall is immersive theater. Instead of resident acting companies, we now have devising ensembles. Resident acting companies, actors arrayed around an institution to support the plays that that institution decides to produce. We have devising ensembles. Hey, let's bring this person in, let's bring this person in, let's use this core of people, let's do this and let's make a thing. This is the way of the future. Instead of institutional productions, big productions made by big institutions, we are shifting slightly toward a self-production world. Make your own work. Build your own little network within the peer network and bring your own work into the world. Instead of dynamic pricing where the institution says here's how much it costs for you audience member to enter the institution and I control the dynamics about that pricing, we are moving to a pay what you can model or a radical hospitality model. We just had a big theater in D.C., forum theater just announced that its shows all of next year will be pay what you can. Every show, every ticket. Forum theater. Yay forum, if you're watching online. And Yay Mixed Blood and all the other theaters that are doing it all over the country. Instead of big brick and mortar institutions in general in the world, people are focusing on the digital presences of organizations which are always available to you, always on. You can always have an exchange with them. In a theater, in a big, big building theater, the doors open at whenever in the morning close when the show is out and you doesn't have to go home but you can't stay there. You can always interact with a brand of a theater online. On Twitter, Facebook, on their website. So instead of these big shows happening in theaters we've got more people bringing shows to where people are. We've got site specific theater. We've got shows in the lobbies of warehouses. We've got shows in Chinese restaurants. We have shows wherever people happen to be congregating. We're bringing theater to the people instead of bringing people into the theater. The big shift for us in this room is that queries and submission packets are increasingly being replaced by social media and new technologies. So instead of all of us in this room standing around the castle hoping we have the right papers to be let in my agent signed this, I swear. I got a master's degree from... My synopsis is exactly 150 words, like you said. Please, can I come in? Instead of that waiting to be let in we are connecting with theaters at all times of day at one in the morning on Twitter at 4.30 a.m. when you're milking the cows on Facebook. Instead of these formalized routine ways of communicating we now have this great egalitarian democratic meritocracy of tweets. You say it and what you say is smarter or more clever or more entertaining than the next person it rises to the top, gets more attention, gets more retweets, gets more mentioned. You don't have to have the right credentials you just have to know how to interact and engage with people. You just need to know the rules for how to exchange and interchange and engage with the person next to you, the person you're staring at, virtually staring at. That's all you need to do. And all of a sudden you'll find out that you're in a network that consists of you and you and you and you form your own little triangle. And then all of a sudden those are not just temporary triangles but they get a harder black line in the drawing because you've cemented a relationship and you've got a real relationship. But at the beginning, let's start with this model. You may be affiliated with this institution but you can tweet to this person at this institution and this person at this one and then the three of you can decide to do a thing together and all of a sudden there are real connections and this graph starts to look one notch more like this one. More and more and more that happens the more this is going to look like this in the real world. We are here today and the conversation that I'm going to have in front of you with Seth is really not how do I get on Facebook? What do I do to tweet right? And we can talk about those things but it's really about learning how to thrive and survive and even prosper as these governing metaphors of the 20th century become the governing metaphors of the 21st century. How do you need to start to think about yourself as a brand, as an artist? How do you need to express yourself, engage with your peers, with your colleagues at theaters and your colleagues in other disciplines in these milieus so that you are successful? If you want to understand why to get comfortable with, say, Twitter and Facebook that is why because this is where the world is going and if you stay back here you're going to get left behind. So we can talk about how to get comfortable and do those things and I'm sure Seth is going to bring that up but that is why, don't forget why. So that's all I've got to say by way of introduction and now Seth's coming on back up. I'm going to get comfortable I'm going to get uncomfortable perched on the edge of this whole table. Whatever you need to do. So I want us to start broad and then kind of narrow in as we go. All of this shakes out a lot of questions for me. And I'm sure everyone else but I think where I want to start is this the system that we're moving into that we're in and that we're going forward into no doubt is empowering that we're all on equal footing that we all have access to the same thing but to me what I encounter with people that are hesitant about this is the intimidating factor the fear of change, the fear of putting yourself out there of revealing too much, of not knowing what's coming back towards you. So how do you navigate those waters? How do you get over all of that stuff? To some extent I want to say that you get over fear the fear of social media the same way you get over any fear which is by doing it and realizing you didn't die. Doing it again and realizing that you weren't grievously injured doing it again and realizing okay that wasn't so bad doing it again and realizing wait a minute maybe that was actually a little bit fun doing it again and you realize hey wait that person I've always wanted to talk to that person and now I just did doing it again and realizing you've made a connection that's valuable doing it again getting a production out of it doing it again realizing you have a real robust community of people that you feel connected to all the time all the time just show of hands how many of you in this room have I tweeted with or emailed with okay that's awesome that's like a 5% or 10% of this room that's great that's awesome real relationships come out of Twitter it's not this I'm just going to throw 140 characters out into the world and pray it's a way to form substantial substantial meaningful connections I'm just looking at you for example we've had some heart to heart on Twitter we've never met until five minutes before this talk but you've been very supportive of me on Facebook and it's meant a lot it's been very real thing to help my career as a writer and we never met thank you I don't know if that answers your question well it does I'm tempted because that segues me down the list here of questions before we get into this because I want to go back I want to take just another step back I just thought that this would be best we talk about the things that we ultimately we're all thinking and it kind of stops us from jumping in the essence of new media is really collaboration I get information from you you get information from me and together we kind of create something based on the various perspectives we're adding but again it seems to me that that is a huge obstacle for organizations and for individuals yes, yes, yes so one thing we inherit and let me just take a step back myself and say that this was the best possible system we had at the time over here this is not hear me really well this is not to knock the people who built the regional theater system which is what that's also a map of they are heroes they're heroes for what they gave us they have institutional knowledge they have cultural knowledge they went to the mattresses for us they built a great system that gave America a lot of work and gave us something to rebel against so we should be grateful to them for that one of the things that we inherit and that's kind of a neutral word I like to use so one of the things we inherit from that system is a sense of ourselves as artists in an atelier working alone right, this is my studio I have finished my thing and when I have finished my thing I might ask you for a little help along the way but when I have finished my thing I deliver it onto you a finished product that's what that model sort of emphasizes you sit out in the suburbs and you take the train in when you're ready to show off what you've done this model is about communicating all the time this model is about showing rough drafts to your partner, to your potential partners in geographically and time dispersed places on a shared project so you might do a bit of work at 1am in Cleveland and then at 2.30 the next afternoon somebody in Boston sends you a sketch for a design for the thing you're writing this is about the network functioning wherever it is and collaboration and the connection between the elements of the network being really essential so we can let go to some extent of what we inherited about being solo practitioners on whom everything on whose shoulders the weight of the world rests ok and then that brings me into this because this has come up several times and people coming up to me before this session about privacy you know this is about putting stuff out there between what you put out and what you keep private and you can take that in many different ways yes, yes indeed I think for me this is something we're all culturally learning together where to draw lines different people are more or less comfortable with different levels of sharing and you might be comfortable on Tuesday and realize on Thursday that you were not comfortable and you might realize that you know on a November 4th that you've spent six months being too restrained and you suddenly realize I need to show more of myself in the world I think ultimately what's helpful is to have for yourself a clear and well-defined strategy for how you're going to use Facebook and Twitter the two predominant ones but there are many others Instagram, Vine and we can talk about all of those Pinterest but predominantly the big two Facebook and Twitter you need to know in your heart that this is what you're going to do so I have tended personally to use Facebook for rabble rousing and organizing and bringing people conversations about causes and sharing pictures of my awesome three-year-old kid and that I use Twitter for connection banter at the lowest level fun banter and playfulness and really deep engagement and in-depth conversation with strangers and with people who are only strangers just for five minutes and then become best friends thereafter so that's my personal strategy so in there you heard me talk about my kid and my wife as well who I also Facebook about and my personal successes I mostly relegate those to Facebook and I might throw a bon-mau about the general culture or if there's a major cultural event a hurricane or a political event I'll join in the conversation on Twitter but that's more about connecting with my friends and having a shared consumption of culture kind of experience so I think when you know what the limits are because you've imposed them you get a sense of when you have overshared and you're the only arbiter of that now I will say that the medium invites oversharing people want to get in sometimes it's because they want to get into your business and they don't have charitable thoughts toward you and sometimes it's your friends and they want to support you and you'll get a Twitter hug you'll get someone who will tweet the word hug to you in the asterisk and it's because they care about you they want to be there for you there are a few things in that that I want to pull out the thing you brought up earlier is about branding it's a term that we throw around all the time personal brand before new media was ever a question before it was ever a thing you were a playwright, a director a dramaturg, a literary manager and now with this system you're all of those things and now you're also a parent a cyclist cancer survivor all of these other things so how do you prioritize the self you put forward? again I think you have to decide what's most important to you but I would stress that the more you show your full human self to the people in your network that's the glue that binds you to one another so I may be drawn to your as an artist in theory I may have even seen your work and care about it but a story is what moves you we all know this a story is what moves people so if I hear a story on Facebook about you even something as simple as you lost your wallet in the metro you were on the way to the hospital to see your grandmother one last time and some stranger found your wallet and brought it to you you cried to the stranger or whatever I'm now moved and I now care about you I'm now going to invest in you as an artist these lines that connect us get thicker the more we travel them the more well worn they become it's like laying down patterns in your brain connections between neurons in your brain so yes I understand that not everyone is comfortable saying I got a cream bill of health for my doctor but when you do you will be shocked at how many people will say how much it meant to them that you let them into your heart a little bit and how much more they care about you and want to be there for you when you need them to vote for you for something I'm trying to speak it south by southwest right now and I put out a call for people to tweet the link I spoke for me to get to speak there I spoke there last year and I want to do it again and it's only because of the friendships I've made in these virtual networks that that tweet went out and that people went and voted for me that's because I tweeted that my son is almost potty trained I can't wait actually honestly I'm now counting the days until I can put on Facebook that he is fully potty trained because it's an important milestone in my life he's not there yet but he's very close because I know it means something to people and I love it when other people do it I love it I think that that goes against our knee jerk reaction whenever we get involved in this we think that we have to put our professional self forward we have to put on kind of a front nobody wants you to be buttoned up and buttoned down and tidy we want to see that you will take the risk to get messy with them that you will show them your flaws you will show them your broken places and your hurts not that you'll be ugly all over the place and there's TMI too much information but if you show where you struggle a little bit and you make a real connection and you're a real person a real genuine person remember this business is all about relationships are you going to want to produce someone's play or are you going to kind of standoff or are you going to want to work with someone who is willing to converse with you and connect with you you know the candidate who gets selected is the one that people say they want to have a beer with you want to be the one people want to have a beer with so whatever your brand's version of that maybe it's a glass of wine and not a beer maybe it's a coffee maybe it's confide your innermost secrets you want to you want people to want to connect with you personal magnetism this is not always easy for us we would always rather talk through our plays and let our work talk for itself that world is over that world is over you are always an advocate for yourself in social media you are always there when I look for someone and they are not on twitter I think I want nothing to do with them nothing it's true because they are not they are not there they are not accessible to me it's all relationship based but the truth is we don't all interact the same way in the real world so that has to translate online so are there traits that we should work to develop or is there a formula for really what is it I think your personality will out I tweet with I'm just suddenly coming to mind she's a playwright and also a philosopher and her tweets are incredibly erudite I'm not going to say her name in case any of you know who I'm talking about because it's very much her style and so twitter conversations with her are these the way philosophers kind of bash up against each other with vicious arguments about the tiniest points and you're like oh my goodness it's a semantics just leave it alone but that's what she wants to do but she's always, what she is is herself, her authentic self right so she does invite her version of have a beer with you is wrestle over the placement of a pronoun in a synopsis right and so you know I think you can bring your authentic self whatever that looks like but there's no not bringing yourself and that's what doesn't work if you're going to stay home stay home and I do have to just you know put on the table with this there's something about being involved in this new media world that like you become very self aware even in like just trying to create a bio in 160 characters for twitter or writing a summary on linkedin you really kind of figure out who you are you know yes and so this actually and this loops me back to your very first question about the fear I've recently edited my twitter bio for a long time since I wrote the thing I had written something like Gwydian Sullivan writes stories that he hopes will make his son one day proud of him which is true I do and I realized that all of a sudden I would have these affiliations to the welders to NNPN to the dramatist guild and that I really needed to be saying these more professional things because I wanted people to know who I am and what I'm part of and so I revised it and then two days later I was like I can do better and I revised it again and then about an hour later I was like oh I can save some characters and add this other thing and I went back and I revised it again this is the beauty of social media it's ephemeral the average lifespan of the average tweet four seconds four seconds that's the average most tweets are gone in a second so there are a few people who are cranking that average up a ton because their tweets get retweeted and they have a lot of followers so the tweet is there to be seen for longer than four seconds so if you do something wrong if you tweet something ugly it'll go it'll just go like this gone it's gone like that it's totally gone someone may have saw it, someone may think that was a weird thing but they've moved on their attention span is on the next tweet that's come down the pipe the other thing I will say is I've made mistakes I have tweeted too much I have forgotten when I was tweeting that I was tweeting with a real human being instead of a brand I have said insensitive things that friends have taken offense at I have had Facebook posts that have gotten a little more heated than I wish they had in all of that I am just like everyone else I am human I do what any human being does when you make a mistake I seek people out and I apologize I just let it be a real thing so I've taken a break from social media I did this recently I'm preempting one of your questions it's fine, let's go with it recently I took a week off that's a big deal for you it's a big deal for me you know it's funny I was on Twitter last night tweeting with Artistic Director of the African Continuum Theater Company in DC we were actually having a private Facebook chat and tweeting at each other at the same time and and we were chatting about a new initiative we're going to work on next year in DC but she asked me about Twitter and she said something like my daughters tweeted 3600 times oh my gosh and I just went over to my Twitter bio and I looked at it and I tweeted about 35 and I told her that I would flabbergast a jaw drop to the floor and then I told her about my friend David Lorre who I know tweets with at least some of you in this room who has tweeted as of last night when I checked his Twitter bio 145,000 times and I realized I was okay I'm fine I'm not over sharing I'm not over doing it I'm just participating in the conversation not that he is over sharing and over doing it god David if you're watching at home we love you I'll check the Twitter he's like he is watching great he's like if you are a theater practitioner of any kind he is like your ever present host he is always there to greet you and welcome you into the conversation with you make you feel at home he is just a good egg David Lorre L-O-E-H-R and his Twitter handle is at the Lorre and thank you you can write me the check later David for the followers so I took it to go back I took a week off and gotten into a actually relatively unheeded argument put an argument nonetheless a debate more than an argument about something in DC and an organization I am affiliated with and that I care about a lot and I was calling into question a decision that they had made and I thought it was a sort of intellectual debate like I was asking what do people think and people chimed in and then I went to bed and in the morning the friend who runs that program said I can't believe you didn't just ask me to have a conversation with you why did you do that in public and I and I did at home and I realized that even a social media expert a guy who gets brought to the drama school conference to talk about social media can make mistakes I want you all to know that like it is possible to screw up and you apologize and make it right and make amends the same way you would apologize if you snapped at your husband or you know blew a friend off that you felt bad about it's not excusing bad behavior but it's just admitting that you're going to behave badly because we all do because we're human in public and don't let that stop you from living and now my friend and I are fine right you know we had a really great conversation about it and in fact I think I'm actually better friends with her now because we had an awkward encounter together so I took a week off and I realized I recommitted to my purpose of which I already had honestly I'm overstating the case here but I recommitted to civility in my conversation I recommitted to listening to thinking before I tweeted as much as I can sometimes it's a rapid fire medium but even one second is better than no second and and yeah I think I'll stop there this is hard for me because now I want to go in four different directions a lot of the things that are coming up here isn't just us molding ourselves to go online but how being online is molding us in the life we live it's I might be making this up but for me it feels like being online and having so much myself out there I actually interact with people in the real world so much easier so I mean I don't know if that's something to build off of but it just seems like our mindset whenever we go into this is I have to change what I am I have to change what I do and it actually comes back to us there's something about the whole world that just kind of makes us a more whole human being I don't know if this is going to respond to what you just said probably not fascinating no I find it fascinating I remember very clearly there's a hashtag on Twitter some of you will be familiar with 2amt pound 2amt the t is theater 2amt I have been tweeting on that hashtag and I have been now for years when I was going to New York for something I can't recall reading one of my plays and I casually said hey anyone in New York who follows the 2am theater hashtag want to get together and instantly there were eight of us who agreed to meet and have a meal have a coffee and then knowing that we had this real world event coming up at which we were all going to be in each other's presence we all tweeted a lot together for two, three weeks before it happened and by the time we met in person it was a real love fest it was people I'd paid attention I'd watched their the trials and tribulations of their everyday life I couldn't get a babysitter I got a babysitter I broke my leg I got I landed a production at this thing I'm worried about whether I'll get revisions done for this time for this deadline etc and I feel like I knew them and it was a kind of a shorthand it's not anything I couldn't have rationally written a bio for too many of them or maybe one sentence so and so is a so and so but I felt connected to them so that when we showed up I think all of us were there remember it as a really profound time that we spent in each other's presence it was really a meeting of of old friends for the first time so yeah I think twitter is Twitter and Facebook kind of it's almost like they grease the skids for a friendship when you get the chance to make one in person and as a playwright do you think that so active on social media and all of that stuff has impacted your writing in the writing process yes the actual writing so I would also say that it's radically impacted I have landed more productions from my presence on Twitter than from anything else I've done in the last three years did you hear that I'll say it again I've landed more productions from being on twitter and from anything else I've done in the last like three years there's your incentive to be on twitter right there I will say that I am less interested than ever in just telling a story and letting people sit back and watch it and I think that that is partially because of being so immersed all the time in a two way communication world or a multi various multi level threaded communication world I am much more interested in engagement in experience design for an audience what kind of experience am I going to curate for the people who are coming to see a show or see a performance much more interested in I have stopped seeing as I wrote in my HowlRound column this last week I've stopped seeing things like blog posts about a play as like necessary marketing evils and more as an actual extension of the storytelling itself I think in trans media terms instead of in old media terms this is kind of my thing and you brought this up earlier if we can assume that it's impacting your work it's also impacting your audience and we can't think about those in silos but we can't think about other so do you write now thinking about an audience you do engagement that's what you're after because you think your audience wants that I do I mean a little bit you know how this business works you take years to develop a play so some of the work that I'm developing now that's coming to fruition I came last week I was in Naples, Florida workshopping and play for a week and of course wall all that stuff and I love this play I love it but the stuff that I'm incubating now and starting now is going to be completely radically different I'm going to create theatrical experiences with the full expectations that people will come with their entire digital worlds their iPads or whatever with them the cloud the social cloud that lives around every human being the digital social cloud will come with them into the theater space and again they may choose as they offered you the choice to ignore that cloud and be present in the room with others and they may choose to be both present and present virtually with their extended audience with the extended audience and issuing forth some of what's happening in the room out into the digital space and they may really retreat and watch the performance from a kind of a distance and engage more in what feels like a safe zone I, you know, I can't control that I don't really want to control that I realized that there's a part in all of us I think that wants attention, look at me, look at me that's not a healthy part of us I don't think that is not a reason to tell a story it's not a reason to be a dramatist you have to pay that attention you have to tell a story for people you have to tell a story to serve an audience and so you serve them by meeting them where they are and giving them an experience that works with them wherever they are I felt the whole room kind of go whenever you held up your iPad to say that you are bringing this was coming into the theater can we have like that little kind of heated discussion about pulling someone in or distract them yes we can have that heated discussion sort of all too often all too often the debate about social media gets reduced to should we have tweet seats or not I don't care about tweet seats if you want to coordinate off some section of your audience and say this is the place where people can have their phones open and they're glowing screens on their faces and they'll only annoy each other so they can treat what's happening that's like an attempt to control the energy that's happening and it's I guess fine if it's fine for your audience but that's missing the whole point it's missing the whole point the point is that every one of us in this room has a social cloud around us for some of us have digitized that cloud some of us are on Facebook and Twitter some of us have those digital representations with us on our iPads and our phones some of us stay deeply connected to those things some of us are only temporarily or lightly or briefly connected to those things one of the reasons I love my iPad is that it's a very light connection to those things there but it doesn't interfere my phone is a little more and it's right here in my pocket over my heart so I take it out before I do this talk because I don't want to feel that cloud I want to be here in the room with you all so I actually turned it off I turned off my cell phone and my iPad I turned the Wi-Fi off so I would be disconnected from them and present with you all not just the choice I made so you're welcome I think also I knew Seth would be connected to Twitter I think that if it is our job as artists to create cultural experiences that serve people we can't serve the people we want to serve we have to serve the actual human beings that are in front of us like I say those human beings are increasingly carrying around these clouds in their hearts and in their heads they're thinking about a conversation they had on Twitter they're thinking about wouldn't my aunt Sally love this play they're thinking about I'm liking being here but I'm feeling a lot of pressure to meet my girlfriend for wine after the play and I need to tell her at intermission where I am and blah blah blah they're thinking about I love this experience and I want to be part of it and this experience is curated to include a chance for me to add my voice to the piece so more and more work we are seeing invites you to tweet invites you to Facebook invites you to take pictures and share them I had a play produced in New York called abstract nude last year and the theater company was about a piece of art the theater company asked everyone in the audience whenever they felt like to take a picture of what was happening on the stage and upload it via an app they built for this purpose and they through the night collected all of the images that were uploaded and then at the end of the play there they were they had formed slowly the backdrop that was happening in the play literally the back of the play was images of the play taken by the audience so cool but it worked because the piece that I created was adapted for that purpose right it was intended to be responsive to the digital world we're living in that's what the conversation is that we need to be having not about tweets it doesn't matter if you want to let people tweet whether watching Willie Lohman grieve and you know rail about the injustices in his life or not it's fine either way Arthur Miller didn't make his play for that it could be interesting let's produce Willie Lohman let's do Death of a Salesman and let everyone tweet and over the course of Iran gather all of the tweets that were tweeted during performances and do some art projects with all those tweets the thoughts about Willie Lohman tweets about Willie Lohman and make some kind of blog post or some other piece of art some other extension that could be cool but that's missing the point the point is we have to think of ourselves as content as artists as curators of experiences some of which will resemble the traditional theatrical experiences we all know and love some of which will look a little bit different and be a little more interactive and have digital components can we talk about the welders yes I didn't know you were going to ask me about the welders I know it just occurs to me that what role did new media play in getting you to this point and what role will it play going forward do I need to tell people who the welders are probably a little bit collective of playwrights in DC launched ourselves to the world about a month ago inspired by but drifting off from 13P familiar with 13P so five playwrights in one executive and creative director we are going to spend three years producing each other's work and then the difference between us and 13P is they imploded when they were done we're handing the whole thing over to another generation of playwrights in DC so lock stock and checkbook logo website bank account board of directors 501C3 we're giving it away we wanted to build a platform for playwrights to interact more immediately in the unmediated non-institutionally mediated way with audiences so that sounds like new media that's this model right here we don't need a big institution connecting us to audiences we are creating a neutral platform that will work hopefully with five new playwrights when we're done my question was just how did it play into getting to where you are now and what will it play going forward well I mean in pedestrian ways honestly the first conversations we had were me emailing two of my fellow welders who were not fellow welders at the time just friends and I said it's time and then we literally spent four hours on Gmail it was the silliest thing we ever did we had a thread it we just had we just emailed each other for four hours sat in our respective offices emailing and now we actually run the organization largely through Google Plus Hangouts so we meet every other week and every other one of those meetings is a virtual meeting you know we're all over the DC area it's not always easy for us to get together in person and so almost all of what we do happens there we use other digital tools like base camp and Google Docs and all kinds of new media tools to run a virtualized organization there's not a brick and mortar location and there never will be I was just generally like I was actually just interested okay so can we go back to talking about well hello hey it's fine someone tweeted a phone rang someone tweeted thank you as are you Herman wasn't it let's go back to talking about strategy is this a term that you use as only an organization or can you actually use the term strategy as a person starting into all this I think every person should have their own personal social media strategy and how do the various platforms weigh into that however you want them to weigh in so I use Pinterest when I for example when I'm gathering inspiration for a new play I gather images that make me feel like my play or that explicitly look like the characters I'm creating or the set and I have a Pinterest gallery of images for each play I've done that only for two or three of them but it has proven useful when I bring on a designer can say here's my information source and they have it there so you kind of have this broken up into tools that you tools that you use and then communication yeah yeah yes I think that's fair can is it fair to ask the question you know we put a lot of emphasis on Twitter we have today I think is there a reason why we talk I mean there are more people on Facebook way more people on Facebook but they are graying so kids and Facebook do not mix I I'm not going to say that I see doom in Facebook's future because they've got too much money and they'll figure it out but Twitter is the new hotness as the kids say and Facebook is old and busted and then there's Google plus there's Google plus which is more of a tool I think for me logistical tool I don't know I think Twitter is more about ideas and it's more I don't know here's my question I think it's all my only answers to you would be coming from my own personal strategy why I use Twitter the way I use it so naturally all the people I follow with maybe the exception of my next neighbor Ben are theater people so I don't interact with Ben very often because you know 800 people I follow are 799 of them theater people so it isn't just that every person fits every platform it isn't you don't just fall into place no I mean I I think there are people who can rationally say I'm ignoring Facebook I just don't want to do it I don't care to share my personal life and I don't need it to be a drama test I think it's harder to ignore Twitter I think it's much harder to ignore Twitter so let me ask the last question and we'll open it up for the room and then online this is what everybody says I can't be involved in new media because it takes too much time how do you manage your time wish I were better at it I have a three year old so I've learned to survive with less sleep I think people make a mistake that they feel like they tweet and then they hang out and there's nothing to do what do they do they just tweeted you have to cultivate and curate your Twitter experience it takes an investment of time up front taking time to follow people and decide these are the people I want to hear from I'm interested in watch conversations other people are having on hashtags and think this person has a point of view that I respect and I can learn from I want to follow them the real hard part is that it takes engaging with people tweeting with them as a stranger saying hello as a stranger you know it's like going to a party where you think about it this way you all know from your communities 5, 10, 20, 25 some number of other theater practitioners some of them are on twitter so the first thing you'll do is you get on twitter and you'll follow all your friends and so going to twitter is going to a party at which you know everyone it's easy to tweet with them and you can share at the same time as you are so it feels a little bit like a party where your friends just were or your friends might be coming later so you can leave them a note so in addition to the friends you followed you might spend some time on one of the prominent theater hashtags and there are really only two of them pound 2amt and pound new play for the duration of this conference please follow pound say thank you you're welcome send me the check send the mail you follow those hashtags and you see what people are talking about and eventually you'll see one of your friends tweet on those hashtags you will respond to your friend and then some stranger will respond to you and you'll get in a conversation with a stranger all of a sudden that stranger feels a little familiar and you follow that person then they say something provocative and you've already talked to them you can talk to them again and you'll reply to them again another stranger comes and slowly more and more strangers start to become your friends and the party starts to feel more like it's always on 2am theater comes from the fact that a conversation was happening at 2am eastern standard time that was a vibrant, vital I was not there at the time a vibrant, vital conversation at 2am theater you can go on 2am t right now and I guarantee you someone's talking about something someone just tweeted a link to an article someone just commented on that article someone's arguing over whether it should be theater R-E or theater E-R there's always something so eventually twitter becomes a party at which you know a ton of people and they're always there and there are a ton of interesting strangers it's like the best party I've ever been to you either know everyone and you're happy to see them or you don't know them and you've admired them from afar and you're so psyched oh my god did you see who's at the party or they're people you don't know and you're excited to meet them because you from experience have learned you're gonna meet cool people and someone there is probably gonna work with you at some point someone's gonna say do you have a play about gun control well I'm putting together a festival of readings of plays about gun control can you send me your work and boom it happened so that upfront investment is serious and it can take months right I'm not gonna lie it can take months if you're not a gregarious person if you are it can happen a lot faster you already have a lot of friends and they're already on twitter you can get into the flow more easily after that investment your time on twitter can be really casual you can log in for five minutes reply to all the people who've tweeted to you maybe one of them happens to be there and you banter back and forth about the thing they've tweeted you about you send a few direct messages which are private messages to your dear friends about oh did you see what so and so did you play a hashtag game which is where you sort of what was the other one the other day it was it was like broadway films broadway plays with plays lesser broadway plays were you participating in it it was lesser so they took titles of broadway plays in like the 37 steps you know you know the gout of a salesman that kind of stuff and you just make palms with your friends for five minutes and you have fun and then you go away so it's like if you're writing I love twitter for this I'm writing I'm writing I'm writing I'm stuck I sit there I'm agonizing I don't know what to do twitter I can banter with my friends exercise a different part of my brain this is a real science here this is a real part of your brain the part you were using in your play lies fallow for a second the neurons kind of quiet down a little bit you get a little perspective you've done bantering you come back and all of a sudden you have more energy to attack that thorny problem in act 2 or the character who isn't resonating so that's I mean my twitter people say you're always on twitter you're always on facebook I'm on facebook every hour so if you add that up that's like 25 minutes and it's again that may even seem like a lot to you so start with 5 minutes and that's fine I find that has replaced all of the energy I spend submitting my work I submit my work to maybe 10 things a year period and I get productions I get workshops I get opportunities I have more than I you know I always want more so take that back world but it comes it comes from just being a part of the larger egalitarian world of communication do I wish that there were more artistic directors on twitter I do but there are some that matter when the really thorny conversations happen and sometimes they don't sometimes they're shockingly accessible shockingly accessible and also celebrities too way more accessible than you would think how many of you know who Ruth Buzzy is Ruth Buzzy and I follow each other on twitter and tweet you know randomly because I found her on twitter I was like oh my gosh I love Ruth Buzzy Ruth Buzzy hi Ruth Buzzy and then we started tweeting and now we're friends that's random and weird flavor-flav how many of you know who flavor-flav is flavor-flav and I follow each other right I'm going to watch that right now totally random what do you say I was going to watch for him to tweet you right I have a list of questions here but I'm sure that this we have several in the room so you want to we'll get to you people we'll get to you if you do have a question you can talk into that microphone just so we can hear you and the people online can hear you you have a question go for it we're very informal here look we're sitting on tables we're drinking water so I'm a total novice to twitter I don't know anything about twitter and I am on facebook so but I don't communicate a lot because I go why are all these people telling all these things about themselves that I would be embarrassed to reveal myself that much so you did kind of cover that issue but I was hoping that I might find out today just how to even get started on twitter do you just put twitter in your computer and get going or what do you do go to twitter.com and you create an account and you start going it actually takes about 3 minutes I would say that also on facebook there are ways to participate on facebook I have really given facebook a short drift in this conversation there are ways to participate on facebook and you can find out your gout or your daughters consulate to me why am I going with gout so much my brother has gout maybe that's it it is kind of a literary disease right follow like on facebook all the theaters in your area like american theater magazine like the dramatist guild if you haven't liked the dramatist guild what are you doing you're on facebook and you haven't liked the dramatist guild your mission is to go like it right away and I don't need a check for that because that's for real that we're all stronger if we're all part of the dramatist guild network on facebook we're all stronger if we can be connected to one another learn from one another so like them and when they ask a question like what's your new challenge with something something I don't know maybe you asked some question to start a conversation you join in and all of a sudden this is what's happening and this room is happening on facebook and it's not about whether you're going to go to Key West or Orlando for your vacation it's about whether you've seen the new anti-baker play and what you think about it which is definitely a conversation I would hope that you're not only comfortable having but eager to have with your other fellow dramatists and that's how to use facebook that's how to use facebook for your career we have so many tweets right now I wanted to give an example of them two of a very positive use of facebook that I had recently I received a message from a Paula Rodriguez who plays but I don't know she wanted to friend me so said okay I took a chance so then she wrote all this happened in Spanish because I'm an international playwright she said are you the writer and I said well I'm a writer and she said are you the expert on the Uruguayan poet de Miragostini who I had written to play about 10 years earlier and I said well I'm an expert so I'm from the expert and she said well we would like to interview you for our radio station in Paisandu Uruguay about your play and about de Miragostini what time is good for you and I said well 4 p.m. tomorrow and she said can we do it via Skype I said alright now it would sound like I went to visit the Uruguayan ambassador and somebody from Columbia College so they listened to the interview the next day and they loved it and now they're supporting my upcoming show at the Cervantes Institute and now Paula Rodriguez is in Chicago I just found out so I have to contact her so we can meet personally so I think if you're open to things on social media incredible things can come in there exactly like that I just want to share that let's take a Twitter question oh lord okay I'm going to try to read it quicker mostly people are retweeting what things that you've said which doesn't surprise me one bit really flattering things hold on I'm going now live making fun of David Laura are they hold on let's see what David had to say because he was in here too why am I not there why is he not here find one and we'll take another live because there's somebody we can end up I want to get to her and then you yes you yes come on up I don't recall this but two years ago you talked to somebody about something about Facebook and I tried to Facebook friend you and you said who are you why do you want to Facebook friend me and I was like because you're awesome you're like okay great my question briefly you mentioned an exchange you had with organization for whom you had a friend and you put it on Facebook and it was kind of a big deal we had a very similar thing recently on HowlRound about you probably read it short short version on Bay Area San Francisco area the Shakespeare Festival one of our local writers who's a reviewer wrote some people say singing article about she went to this outdoor Shakespeare Festival all the rich people had blankets all the poor people didn't all the rich people had free food what is it with this organization they don't support people coming to see the show that aren't rich and it became this big hairy deal which the point I'm trying to make with your comment is the director of the festival said why didn't you call me first before you put this article out and many of us responded with a freaking point the point is this writer went and observed things that she saw and wrote about them not as a challenge but as an informational educational world opening view of here's how our audiences might view what they feel is a very elitist system and not even what are you going to do about I'm curious like why you felt that you had to apologize to your friend when you brought up an issue I assume was a serious issue and to have the world talk about it why they were upset that you wanted the world to see that you had some questions about it that's all Social media is an echo chamber it gives back more of whatever you give it sometimes in this world it is important to express your anger and your outrage and social media does a great job of amplifying that and sometimes it is important to be uplifting and point out to as my friend Travis Baddard who's probably on Twitter right now would say to talk about what's good hashtag sometimes it's important to talk about what's good and let the echo chamber of social media amplify that as well build circles of positivity I think in that case I asked a kind of neutral to negative question when I might have asked they asked it in a more positive way and so you know heck over apologize and make sure that people you love know you love them I think that this is an open question what is your version of a hangout with me that was on a Twitter thing who he the yellow well hello was that an open question was that for Gwydian or is that an open question well never mind David law actually said social media is really about advocating for other people that's kind of a conversation that was going on here it's not just about advocating for yourself it's about advocating for others really one of the most so I have a blog you may have read at some point something I wrote one of the most popular posts I ever wrote I just picked 77 it's a random number and I made a list of 77 things I thought were pretty spectacular about DC theater that's it names of actors pre-show meals you could get near a certain theater a season of all playwrights that I liked just random things and that's all I did I just want to say a lot of nice stuff was inspired by Travis Bedards talking about what's good I think the more that you put that energy out in the world the more you're there for others it really really again it's an echo chamber you get back which you put out and I believe me if you know me at all I'm not a kind of karma touchy feely kind of guy I don't know about any of that stuff I'm just talking about in real practical terms you tweet a nice thing about somebody because you from the heart not just to do it they're gonna be there for you it's just cementing a social relationship you're building a network real fabric, real ties between people so yeah I mean that's why I to answer the apology question again I just want to be putting good out as much as I can because I think that comes back you and then you I have two more okay yeah Facebook so apparently you don't accept everybody who tries to be friends ultimately you did but not originally apparently so my question is I do Facebook and not Twitter and I think I'm doing it all wrong because I get requests for people and if I don't recognize them at all I just ignore it until I keep doing it and then I'll click on them and see if they look interesting and I make decisions based on that and now I'm thinking I should just let everybody in is that the case? is that? and then figure out if they're a scammer I mean it's obvious if they're somebody not nice but like if someone wants to connect with you it's either because they want something from you and you don't want to give it to them and then he can say bye bye or because they really like you alright so now let me ask you since I'm a Facebook person and not yet a Twitter does it work differently on Twitter? in other words do you have the same do you have to accept people on Twitter? no well some people protect their tweets so that they have to allow it's usually people who are job hunting they don't want their boss to know what they're doing or they have stalkers they're trying to avoid really I'm not making light in real situations like that people need to protect themselves but no anyone can follow you anyone can follow and you get an email saying so and so follow you and that's it do you want to take a question from Twitter? keep going you actually back there and then you in front maybe we can so I'm actually not a novice at this and I just did an interview I'm really surprised to hear you say that you've gotten so many productions from in the last two years from tweets from Twitter because I just interviewed Ariel Hyatt do you know Ariel? she does music mostly the music business and I asked her about return on investment in terms of social media and she raised it to like wanting to make money at a cocktail party and so I would love to hear an example of how a tweet one of your tweets led to a gig I would say that I would abandon the phrase return on investment and replace it with return on engagement because what we're doing is not this is not a financial transaction Twitter does not adhere to market norms Twitter is about building relationships relationships are what make theater happen so there is no one tweet that I can point to that got me a production I can tell you that my relationships with people you know the sense I got and that others got that we liked each other and that we would enjoy working together facilitated facilitated facilitated us making connections when there were opportunities to work together so you cannot cannot do social media because you're hoping you're going to get a production you do social media to be part of the world to give to the world to contribute to this ongoing conversation we're all having to join to link up to the network that's why you do social media the network then in turn is how theater gets produced people get to know who you are they get a sense of what your presence is like they get a sense of what you care about of how your mind works and how your heart works and they say I want to work with that person and then that that sort of connected energy is there for when hey we need a show for our upcoming season we have something so again it's not a lever you can pull to get produced that's really wrong and if I suggested that I take it back it is it is a place to be part of the world I think that actually answers one of the questions that we got on Twitter which was do you monetize your social media presence with that was off the list Kyra Cohen writes most surprising or perhaps least recognized thing that social media has brought to play rights around the theater world most surprising or least recognized thing that social media has brought to play rights around the world gosh I have no idea you know what ask that question of Twitter tell Twitter answer that question because excellent Twitter answer her question can you retweet that question Seth is going to retweet the question this person has answered someone on Twitter is going to answer that question better than I can that's another thing social media is about I am no longer in my own mind I no longer have to have all the answers I can Google for the answer or I can go to Twitter last night I was worried about how to get from midway airport to this hotel Chicago Tweeps can I take the orange line to Roosevelt for people within seconds answered me oh yeah you take it then you walk this way it's no big deal that's someone said that's why the orange line exists right I didn't know that I actually lived here for like four and a half years back in the late 80s and early 90s oh see there you go there you go but so the internet or Twitter crowdsourced my answer for me boom and someone has an answer already no not yet someone says that there's a surprise you didn't mention YouTube as the greatest thing that Twitter no no just in general I think we are only now figuring out how to use YouTube I think the wrong way to use YouTube is to simply broadcast our work I think another wrong way though it seems like the right way to be using YouTube is to make trailers for our plays I think we need to be using YouTube to create movies that are extensions of the storytelling on the page so that we're thinking about trans media storytelling where a component of the story is a video and a component is on stage but you know I don't know what do I know Twitter will have another answer for me the world will have another answer for me do we have another question yes this person right here had a question and then I'm sure there will be others wondering how you think that social media is changing what the website is for for a writer it's a great question I'm actually about to be reinventing my own web presence when I get back to this conference so with the advent of blogging platforms which is another part of social media Tumblr and Wordpress and the like that we haven't talked about at all to my sorrow you are now your own publisher that is a gift and a burden the gift is you need not wait for anyone to approve or accept your work for publication you just put it out in the world period and the story and people can start interacting with it that also means that monetizing it is hard to use that phrase it also means that you make mistakes and you publish too much and you publish too often and then you things are not polished when you put them out in the world and some of that is okay because people want to see your process they don't want to see the end product I think we have to think about websites as the version of you that is always available to the world so you are always there to be interacted with so your website needs to reflect your personality much more than it needs to have links to all your publications links to all your reviews links to your whatever it needs to just be who you are because people are forming impressions about you by what they find about you when they go there what you will the impression you will form about me when you go to my site if you go to my site and I don't want to presume that you will is that the Cobbler Son has no shoes at the moment would come back in a week a week and a half we are getting close on time do you want to take one more from the room and one more from twitter? sure how about the person way back there who just raised her hand hello I had a question about earlier when you were talking about branding and I guess this is part of the website thing also you talked about it's all about story which is really a terrific way to yourself but in social media so many other people have input into that story of you so you are crafting a brand and a story and then you have this input from a lot of other people so I wanted to know how do you manage that and how much is story and when does it become like trivia or noise you know you can tell I think we all know this instinctively you can write a great story but if it's in your drawer or in a file on your computer and you interact with it is it really a story at all it only becomes a story in some sense when an audience is engaging with it either by sitting back and reacting or by participating in the telling of it so in as much as a brand is a story if you keep it in the closet and you don't express it in the world it's no good it's just an abstract thing that's unreal so it's connected in the world and you have your sort of aspirational brand your the being you want to be in the world and then you have your lived brand the way it gets made manifest in your engagements and your interactions with others and the goal is to keep your lived brand as close to your aspirational brand as you can and to be willing to do a little something periodically take a look at your aspirational brand and say hey maybe I've evolved in a different way and I want it to be different less humor, less banter, less hashtag gaming on twitter and more 140 character profundities for example Sam Byron tweets to us do you please now have the ability to break audiences away from their clouds as well as you there's so much hostility toward audience members why do you think people are going to keep coming up to see your shows if you're worried about turn your cell phones off and pay attention to me or behave in a certain way or sit still or don't open your candy at the wrong time there's so much hostility toward audience members that we're trying to control them you can't control people you can't control social media you just have to be in it and be of it we have to occupy a place as storytellers that is part of a community now I think unless we are writers and so we're always going to be outside of a community observing it and commenting on it it's our job to dream the culture forward as I think Carl Jung said although I hear it from Mack Rogers as a quote from Carl Jung so I don't know if that's right Mack Rogers or Mack Taylor one of those two anyway it is our responsibility to be connected to our audiences and to not pander to them to offer them opportunities for deeper engagement but not be hurt if they don't take it you know give your plays like gifts and people can do with a gift whatever they want they can re-gift if you're really giving a gift you don't expect them to use it in the way you want them to use it they may use it in unexpected ways so in the world of social media don't don't obsess about how how compelling if your show is so compelling that it makes people turn off their cell phones you can't control people make a compelling show and if it's right for them to turn off their cell phone they will what's the last nugget you want to leave with us in a changing world like this the people who survive are not the people who cling to familiar things the people who survive are the people who experiment like my three-year-old right that's what three-year-olds are they're experimenters I wonder what this radish is going to taste like in my mouth oh no they try things they leave they try things they learn from their failures and they fail forward to a new and better thing so try twitter try facebook in a different way don't feel like you're doing it the wrong way or that there is a right way just do something play see if you like it if you don't like it try something new if you do like it do more of it by all means tweet to me if you want to I'm nice tweet to David Lorre he's nice tweet to playwright Steve in the back he's nice Jay Lynn Roberts is that right she's nice you know Seth underscore Eli I'm kind of nice I'm kind of nice well can I say thank you then for doing this tonight if we missed one of your tweets tonight we'll get to your question so I'm sorry if we overlooked it this time but thank you all very much and thanks for watching online