After Dark, July 2, 2013

Beware The Pundits

On lessons learned outside of theatre

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

@gcharlebois

I don't know exactly when punditry started to be seen as vision.

Perhaps it was when the appropriately stupidly-named Faith Popcorn (née Plotkin) prognosticated on the future in her highly readable mega-bestseller The Popcorn Report. Her predictions on cocooning, small-A androids and food coaches have been largely debunked by time but we swallowed them whole for one important reason: most of them were appealing. She was describing a world where everything was possible.

Then there are the nay-sayers like computer expert Clifford Stoll who, in Newsweek in 1995, famously said (and I will quote him at length because it merits it, because powerful people believed him, and because we see the wreckage of his "expertise" all around us): 

"After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Now let me just say this: by the time this article was written my weekly paper (now defunct) was using email extensively, I was surfing the web, I had learned how to create and then created a website and I was writing The Enclopedia of Canadian Theatre on The WWW (now called, simply, Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre). In my naïve, wide-eyes the internet seemed to make everything possible. So what did I know that expert Stoll did not? Nothing. I was just imagining endless possibilities that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

But while I was doing that, people were listening to Stoll. Newspapers ignored the web and all are now floundering. Even as I continue to love the smell of a new book, I and millions more read all our books on a tablet of some sort. Magazines too, and - oh my! - even newspapers.

Let me quote later in Stoll's article: 

"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople." 

This one is a real howler (and even Stoll, today, sees it as such). How many of us buy online for the very reason we can avoid the hard-sell sales-boys at Future Shop, for instance. 

It's just this. Expertise is not vision. Vision is like theatre: we suspend disbelief and we imagine the impossible. You've seen the difference between the two in theatre over and over again: actors with passion vs. actors with the best training; directors who can give you the erudite, bookish whys and wherefores of their production, but strangely fail to move us with it; literary academics who predict the death of theatre every week and point to diminishing audiences as proof (without also taking into account what the economic academics point out: that in the present economy disposable income is also diminished).

Popcorn may not have been right. But she dreamed. Stoller was wrong because he didn't. That is a lesson for everyone who touches the internet. Actually, for everyone who does anything...especially theatre.