I find that they provide a mysterious perspective on the inner workings of a theatre. In the case of Yukio Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night, the set changes engendered an unexpected mood of cathartic mise-en-abîme. A sense of infinite regression heightened perhaps by a back-drop of mirrors on stage where, if I had been more attentive, I may have seen Lyn Gardner idly taking notes in amongst the sea of voyeurs.

Lyn Gardner wrote a piece about the performance for The Guardian (she didn’t like the set changes). I invite you to view the source code of her article (toolbar > view > source). Google sucks up the syntactical nutrients contained in this story within a story and spews out the title and a short description of the article on the search results page for ‘Shockiku Grand Kabuki’. Being included in the first 10 links returned, based on a Google search is the search engine optimisation (SEO) sweet spot and the Guardian’s ability to reach it consistently is no coincidence. The Guardian employs SEO specialists to make sure that the Guardian’s online pages appear relevant to Google. You are not the primary audience for the article nor are you the judge of its relevance or quality. This is Google’s privilege.

In their headlong rush to survive, online newspapers have exposed the rocky truth of their existence: they thrive by spamming Google (and a host of other smaller but collectively important referral sources). Lyn Gardner’s true purpose at the Guardian is to produce search engine friendly copy. Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

A small degree away from the dark art of search engine logic, there is the minefield of web-analytics. Web-analytics is the bucket that processes the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the Internet; the system that trends the ebb and the flow of online traffic over time. If you click on one of the links above (effectively a request for the page) it will, amongst other things, run JavaScript code in your browser which in combination with an invisible image request and a tracking cookie will send data back to a remote server where it will eventually be pushed to a reporting interface. This process is commonly called ‘page tagging’.

Page tagging allows the Guardian’s web-analytics software to faithfully record the fact that something has requested a file defined as Lyn Gardner’s article. If you have never visited the site before, you will be counted as a unique visitor to that page. ‘Unique Visitor’ is a euphemism for an Internet enabled device. It is assumed that a person is controlling the device but it could just as well be an automated script. The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters.

At some point, behind the scenes coding became more important than the journalistic front of house authoritative first take on daily events. This is a world away from the beauty of Ninagawa’s vision but just like set changes, it has to be considered.

There are very few professional theatre critics in the UK, by which I mean people that earn a living from theatre criticism alone. Of those few, the vast majority are of what most people like to call ‘a certain age’. I knew this before attending the discussion; as a young person working in the field of arts journalism, it has a direct effect on my life. What I hadn’t considered was the effect it has on the evolution of theatre journalism as a form.

The small cadre of professional critics was represented on the panel by Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Telegraph. From the off, Spencer declared himself openly hostile towards theatre bloggers. He accused the blogosphere of watering down critical discourse with a morass of uninformed opinion, and claimed that same morass would soon put him and his colleagues out of their jobs.

Spencer labelled his hostility “a generational problem”, and admitted that he simply didn’t like computers and technology. He also labelled himself “the last of the Luddites”; unfortunately, this epithet is not as accurate. His contemporaries are, if anything, older and more set in their ways than he is. Which means the most powerful portion of the critical establishment wants nothing to do with new media.

How is criticism supposed to evolve and find a place in the media as it exists today, if its biggest names think blogging is the enemy?

Not everyone in the industry is resistant to the change new media offers. Andrew Dickson, arts editor for the Guardian Online, was also a panellist. The Guardian have been quicker than their competitors to embrace online content. But the publication still follows the formats and processes of print journalism. Dickson commissions reviews, blog posts and podcasts or videos in the same way as his print counterparts.

No one has yet fully grasped the potential of new media. No one has fully exploited the combined power of online journalism, podcasting, social networking and mobile synchronisation. I still structure my reviews for London Theatre Blog the same way I would for a print publication. But if the critical community is held back by an older generation with a lot of clout and no love for web 2.0, by the time we get there technology will have moved ahead of us again.

In some ways perhaps it already has. Wired magazine declared the death of blogging in October, and the theatre industry still has yet to fully acknowledge its legitimacy. Whether or not the problem is generational, there is indisputably a problem: technology moves fast, and we’re being left behind.

Brickbats in Cyberspace took place at the Royal Court Theatre on Monday 1 December 2008. The event was braodcast live online and here is the full audio archive of the event.

The participants were as follows:

Chair:
Karen Fricker, critic for Variety magazine and lecturer in Theatre Criticism at Royal Holloway university

Panellists:
Andrew Dickson, arts editor for guardian.co.uk
Judith Dimant, producer for Complicite
Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Daily Telegraph
The West End Whingers, theatre bloggers

In theatre terms I am a newbie. So is it really possible to make a living and a lifestyle out of loving theatre? Well, I aim to find out. If it is possible, I will let you know how. So far I make fairly scrubby wages pulling a full time job and doing a bit of critic work on the side. It’s not great, but it ain’t bad either. Most of my friends sold their souls within months of leaving Uni and bought into the utopian dream that we were all going to get out there and change the world. ‘Who wants to be in banking?’ we cried on graduation day, only to watch as one by one the pressure started getting to us and idealistic students were sucked into the vortex of figures, suits and ‘professional attitudes’ known as the city.

Well, all this seems to have happened to everyone but me. Actually there is me and one particularly courageous friend who wants to make it as an ASM so badly that she is sleeping on friends sofas while she slaves away for free doing what she loves. Courageous, bold, and, agreed upon over copious amounts of wine with other wage slaves, pretty foolish. ‘Doesn’t she need her own space? It’s very well now, but what happens when she is thirty and still kipping on our floors with no real office experience, it won’t be so funny then will it?’ How did this happen to us? How have we gone from care free arts students to finger wagging depressives who shrug our shoulders on a Sunday night and say, ‘it’s the way the world works, we just have to get used to it I suppose’. So is she right, are my friends in the city right, can I make a living from writing about theatre? Well, I don’t know yet. I guess we will all have to wait and see.