The knee-jerk reaction against "Tweet seats" has been getting on my nerves. I've seen few logical cases against them and a lot of moaning and vaporing about the decline of civilization. I want to hear people talk about art in terms of experimentation, and playfulness, and intellectual rigor. Not sentimentality and sanctimony.
I haven't changed my mind on Tweet seats, but this blog post by PeaceBang has made me more sympathetic to the anti-Tweeters. PeaceBang is a huge fan of social media in all kinds of ways, but she writes a heartfelt elegy to in-person, coffee-breathed, inconvenient, slightly dorky Sunday service at an honest-to-God bricks-and-mortar church:
But I love the local church so much. I love the local church's traditions, I love its architecture, I love its cast of characters, I love its organs and its parish halls and its altars. I love its presence on the landscape, its seasonal fairs and its parking lots on Sunday mornings. I love its rituals, its candles, its spirit when empty and when filled with people in the act of singing or praying together, or just listening. I love the incarnational, embodied reality of it. I love its kitchens, its coffee hours, its bulletin boards and hymnals. Best of all, I love Sunday mornings when parents bring their little guys up the sidewalk with insane bed head. I love standing in a din of chatting people after the service in a post-service state of zonkedness, and watching the kids zoom around playing a forbidden game of tag. I love the moment when someone brings someone else a cup of coffee. I love the sign-up sheets that signal that we're not doing all our business electronically.
I am as adept a purveyor of the zippy Tweet as anyone, and certainly talented at writing simultaneously thought-provoking and entertaining blog or Facebook posts. I have participated in meaningful on-line worship services and I am glad they are being developed and offered. I find a great deal of hope, power and holiness in the ways that technology makes us aware of what King called "the inescapable network of mutuality" and what my own faith tradition calls "the interdependent web of existence." But I am very mindful of the limitations of virtual connections and spiritual affiliations that are not grounded in the local church experience.I've seen the promise of social media in the theater. Maybe theater is so much a part of my life, something I've taken for granted, that all I think about when I think about "Tweet seats" is the novelty, the chance to learn, the potential. Theater, for me, isn't a sacred escape from the real world. But theater doesn't mean for everyone what it does to me. And maybe some of what it means is threatened by Tweet seats.
Next Monday, Arts in America is sponsoring a panel discussion at 7:30 pm at Central Square Theater (450 Massachusetts Avenue) on Tweet seats, and I'll be one of the panelists. It's a free discussion -- RSVP here.
