The New Age of Being On Stage
I held off on writing about the Sarah Lacy / Mark Zuckerberg keynote “trainwreck” at SXSW when it originally happened, and was glad I did - it was pretty fascinating, but it got covered so thoroughly in the moment that there was no need to add more to the mix. But I keep thinking about it, and I keep seeing other indicators that something is going on much broader than just a single bad interview at a tech conference. So I jotted some notes down about this, and here they are:
The Lacy/Zuckerman interview was emblematic of a shift going on in on-stage events and performances right now. Audiences now have back channels during events thanks to group messaging apps, and that’s not going away. In fact, just the opposite - this will become more and more common to live events. In a short while these back channels will even become a normal, expected part of the audience experience at any stage event.
This totally changes the way information flows at these events. Communication in a performance environment historically has been one to many - the person on the stage communicated, and the people in the audience received that communication. There was some feedback from the audience, in the form of laughter, applause, nonverbal cues, etc., (Steven has a good post about tricks he uses to elicit this feedback while speaking), but for the most part the communication went in one direction.
Now though, with the arrival of applications like Twitter, you’ve got two types of communication happening in any performance simultaneously: you’ve still got the one-to-many communication from performer to audience, but you’ve also got a second, many-to-many conversation, between everyone in the audience. And here’s the critical thing about it: the ONLY person not involved in that many-to-many conversation is the person on stage. There is suddenly a second channel of information in the room, potentially as informative and interesting as the traditional one that goes from the performer to the audience, and the person up on the stage is left out of it completely. All of the information from the audience, which should be feedback to the performer, is now being channelled into group chat apps, and the one person who needs to get that feedback, so as to adjust their performance based on it, is totally oblivious to it.
When Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg had their talk at SXSW, there were 2,000 people in the room. 2 of them, Lacy and Zuckerberg, were having one conversation, while the other 1,998 were having a totally different conversation. If Lacy had had access to that second conversation, the interview would have gone very differently. The introduction of group messaging into public performance has created a big imbalance in the flow of information between performer and audience, and it puts the performer at a potentially big disadvantage.
Stage events have suddenly become many-to-many events in addition to being one-to-many. That’s a fundamental shift from what they have been historically. And since the person on stage herself is not included in that second, many-to-many conversation, it sets up an informational imbalance that is bound to lead to things like what happened at SXSW.
This imbalance will get dealt with in one way or another eventually, and performances will adapt. How this happens is a completely open question, of course, and we could see some interesting new practices spring up in the near future. Whatever the case, a new era of stage events is at hand.
