From Smoky Cafes to IMs, Twitters, and Woots
Buy tickets for Mom & Pop now!
Throughout Columbus playwright Sarah Tobin’s Mom and Pop (opening Thursday and featuring yours truly!), the characters lament and debate the demise of the mom-and-pop businesses that used to be the backbone of this nation.
On the one hand, most of us have the best of intentions, rooting for these small businesses to defeat the mighty corporate conglomerates like Starbucks, Lowes, Walgreens, and countless other superstores that have slowly but surely devoured independently run stores for lunch. Unfortunately, we often (as does the character, Luke) root with one hand, while holding a venti soy latte with a double shot of espresso in the other. We give lip service to supporting the local newsstand, as does the character Eda, but we swing by the local Walgreens to pick up our newspaper on the way home. My caustic and fairly unlikeable character, Gail, makes an uncomfortably valid point when she asks, “If the world wants to be taken over, who am I to stop it?”
The change in our commercial landscape begets other changes as well. Whereas we used to be able to gather at the local cafe to pay about one dollar (not $5) to sip a bottomless (yes, they used to refill it for you!) actual mug (no recycled paper cup with a reusable heat sleeve!) of actual coffee-flavored coffee (no flavor shots, not organic, not free trade), now we sit alone with our single gourmet coffee drink with its no-drip plastic lid as we gobble up bandwidth on a free wifi connection.
And as we sit alone but crowded in overpriced disposable corporate coffeehouses, we now converse via Chat or IMs, using severely truncated abbreviations to flash short missives about nothing to our “buddies.” And that’s not all. A friend (one, incidentally whom I know only virtually) recently invited me to follow her Twitter. I had NO idea what this meant and did a little investigating. Best I can tell, this odd little corner of the webiverse supports participants’ needs to randomly and periodically post short moment-to-moment status updates. For example, “X wants blueberry pancakes very badly,” or, “Y could NOT decide what to wear today!” (At our first tech rehearsal, a Raconteur member wryly called Twitter “the stalker’s best friend.”) And, as fellow blogger, Nicki (again, someone I know only virtually) points out here, anybody with an interest can subscribe to something called a “Woot Watcher.” This add-on keeps the user informed with up-to-the-minute information about which Woot-worthy products are supercool and/or nearly sold out. And of course, there’s Facebook… the web giant I tried briefly (everyone was doing it!) but ran screaming away from when somebody “nudged” me, someone “poked” me, and several people put things on my “wall.” I had no idea what any of this meant, so I abandoned ship. (Though I found out later, and felt quite disturbed by the fact that once one creates a Facebook account, it never really goes away.) A brief exploration of MySpace revealed a similarly bizarre set of esoteric jargon I felt vaguely disturbed by. And yes, I do in fact follow your line of logic and therefore note the irony that I happen to be blogging about the strangeness of neo-webified-psuedo-communal-intellectualism that seems to be replacing actual face-to-face conversation in the proverbial smoky cafes. And I agree. Prior to June of this year, I stuck my nose in the air and rolled my eyes at bloggers, too. But here I am. So be sure that I don’t count myself above anyone who IMs, Twitters, or Woots— or buys Starbucks, Lowes, or Walgreens for that matter.
I just wonder how these new realities will change our future creative landscape. As my dear friend Arf pointed out during a phone call this past weekend, people used to sit in cafes and smoke and talk about the world’s problems for hours. We realized this next point to be remarkable in its political incorrectness, but Arf and I spy an unhealthy side effect to the non-smoking trends: nobody sits in cafes for that long any more! How many plays, books, essays, films, paintings, dances were born out of those long and often heated conversations over too much caffeine and nicotine? No longer sitting together, sipping and puffing, what will inspire our new art? And what form will it take?
Hang on. I’d answer that, but I have to go check my email. And, hey, if you can tear yourself away from whatever social networking site you like best long enough, come on down to the Columbus Dance Theatre to check out the show. You can always Twitter and Woot about it later. TTFN. TTYL. LYL.