About a month ago or so, my business consultant Marcy Stahl told me about a new platform that provides virtually instantaneous transcription of Zoom meetings in progress as well as audio recordings of past meetings. [It's called Otter.ai ]
I wasn't sure whether I actually needed this service but the entry level subscription was inexpensive enough to allow me to sign up for a service I wasn't sure I needed.
As luck would have it, one of playwrights in this year's Self-Production Boot Camp which I'm teaching again for the Dramatists Guild Institute came to me with a request for transcriptions of each class. It's long been understood that some of us learn best visually, others learn best by participating in a group discussion and there are still others among us who will retain new concepts most readily when they're presented in written form.
And so thanks to Otter.ai I'm not only able to provide my students with a group discussion in class, a video recording of each class, my usual handouts and homework assignments but also now... for the first time in more than 25 years of teaching, I have the luxury of providing a written transcription of every word that is uttered in every Zoom class.
First I left Facebook. Then you convinced me that my bottom line depended on my return. Now I'm leaving Twitter.
Here's the inconvenient truth. Social media is fundamentally antisocial. And by that I mean the very architecture of social media does not support prosocial behavior. And when society is under threat of collapse, we all need (now more than ever) to find ways to access those parts of ourselves inclined toward acting in support of the needs of others first.
My mother, Nechama Tec, embarked on the first comprehensive study of the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In her first book on the subject, When Light Pierced the Darkness,she uncovered some surprising traits shared by most of the hundreds of Righteous Christians she interviewed. Turns out the usual categories by which sociologists would first embark on a comparative analysis of large groups such as religiosity, social strata, gender, etc. seem to have been largely inconsequential. Instead, she found some less obvious deeper qualitative traits that were shared by a majority of these individuals. And one of them was a pre-war established habit of prosocial behavior.
Stop to offer help to someone who appears to be lost, dig into your pockets for some spare change to offer to a homeless person on the street, rearrange your schedule to help a friend who's being discharged from the hospital...
The people who habitually (easily, casually, even unconsciously) consider the needs of others important and interesting just might save us all when the shit hits the fan.
Social media encourages us to look inward, not outward. And it does this for one simple reason.
I'm in the middle (well, probably only 20% of the way in if I'm honest) of a steep new learning curve around social media algorithms, Search Engine Optimization and the very powerful and quixotic (not-to-be-overlooked) chill of audience disinterest.
And yesterday I came upon this paragraph in a pretty interesting (albeit somewhat depressing) post I'll link to here.
In early 2017 I made the decision to #unfriendfacebook. I decoupled. I changed my profile picture to this.
At the time I thought I understood my reasons. It seemed to me quite indisputable that the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election had been handed to Trump by Facebook. ///HOLD IT! STOP THIS BLOG POST RIGHT THERE!
As I write that last sentence, there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind tap-tap-tapping for attention. And I have just interrupted this post to hear it.
It says:
Hold on there, Roland, are you sure you want to let your political position muddy the waters here? I mean, we are a country divided and suppose one of your students or potential students is reading this. With that little bit about the 2016 election, you may have just eliminated 50% of your potential target market.
Regardless of how one falls on the many sides of that strange interrupting worry, what concerns me most, and what I need to address here is the kind of landscape in which such a worry even makes any sense at all.
And by that I mean, an online world which through the powerful and slowslowslow moving and largely imperceptible forces of corporate interests has grown and continues to tilt further and further toward a kind of malignant embrace which play acts connection but at its core is really just pretty much always trying to sell you something.
Because if this blog is seen to exist to serve two masters -- my human desire to dig down to the truthand the promotional needs of my business-- aren't we fooling ourselves just a little bit? I mean, if we actually try to convince ourselves that these two impulses can live under the same roof? Without killing each other?
What do you do when you wake up one morning to discover that the world you've helped build is pretty much one enormous billboard?
As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years.
Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?
Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year.
It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.
$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.
I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.
This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:
That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month.
It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.
That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.
But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshopin which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).
As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.
If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.
The other day I was chatting with a friend who is something of an expert in the field of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and all things WWW-related. And a fact of life of our brave new online world just sort of spilled out and I'm embarrassed to admit, although this fact of life or fact of internet architecture is apparently common knowledge to anyone posting content online, I had somehow never heard or read this fact.
Blog posts should be written around a set of search terms and the search terms should be carefully selected through research into the most common search terms in the topic about which you're writing. Apparently this is the way people who do not already know you and your blog will find their way to you.
When your posts have been carefully constructed around a curated set of key words and phrases designed to attract the right people to your blog, i.e. the people most likely to find it interesting and worthwhile.
Here's the very first post which now strikes me as a little wet behind the ears and possibly somewhat blind to the vast tundra that the internet can be to the writer who posts from the heart without even a moment spent considering how people might find their way to you.
In a way, then, this blog has been floating in the shadows, only entering the field of vision of the people somehow connected to its contributing authors. Maybe that's why what began as a group blog eventually dwindled down to pretty much me posting 90% of the time.
Were the other E.C. Authors simply not getting enough bang for their buck? I wish one of them had told me.
Since I founded Extra Criticum in May of 2008, I have simply been writing about whatever thing struck me as important, odd, amusing or troubling. The most thought I ever gave to search happened once I'd finished whatever post I was working on when I'd stare at that empty box and come up with about a dozen key words to enter which I assumed would assist the Google bots and any other search engine creatures to find the article based on... what I thought it was about.
My new play A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored(which I'm currently performing on Wednesday nights) grew out of the January 6th insurrection. My last film, We Pedal Uphill was my very personal attempt to make sense of the climate of fear which seemed to take root in this country in the months and years immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first play of mine that was produced in New York, Bodily Function, grew out of an offhand remark made by a midlevel corporate executive about workplace morale and bathroom breaks. The comment was delivered casually, almost cynically over a brunch with friends in Boston. Maybe the fact that the man who made the comment was not a friend of mine but rather a friend of friends, kept me from asking a pointed follow-up question. And so for weeks afterward I was haunted by the values behind his remarks. And eventually found my way to a play about a woman who has reached the pinnacle of success in her career yet somehow finds herself not quite feeling what she always imagined she would.
For whatever reason, there usually is some kind of thorn or confounding riddle at the center of the scripts I write. I'm drawn to the details of how human beings cope. We are uniquely creative and optimistic animals most of the time and how we manage to overcome, work around or stumble through life's towering obstacles is, I think, where the most vivid storytelling lies.
So it shouldn't have surprised me to find that my latest play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored has left some audience members feeling a kind of emotional whiplash. The piece is a kind of attempt to capture something of the tenuous relationship to truth and reality we find ourselves swimming in these days. And so the man at the center of the piece is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator.
It's difficult to know what to believe as he leads us from one assertion to the next, not much of it able to be held by the same single reality of one person's life.
It turns out that after an hour of very dark laughter, distortions of the facts of our reality and the tension of an audience holding one man's future in their hands through their vote at the end of the show, people need a few min. to process what they've just been through.
And you told us as much in the feedback offered online after the first three performances.
Post-Show Process Conversations Led by Leading Thinkers in the Fields of Psychology, Government, the Arts, Sociology, History and the Law.
I'm performing my latest play Wednesday nights in July at 8PM, EDT. It's a solo Zoom show because it's all about these past two years -- pandemic isolation, January 6th, social media, Zoom, fear and a social fabric's frayed edges. And believe it or not, it's also funny. Well, funny and dark. That's kinda my M.O.
Here's what audiences are saying. Oh! And if you have any intention of seeing it, you only have two more chances. Last performance is July 27th. I don't want you to miss this one and I have a hunch you might not want to either.
As we enter Year 3 of the early 21st century pandemic, it's understandable why we might all long for nothing more than a life outside... outside the walls of Zoom.
The last couple years were dominated by stories of loss -- loss of income, loss of job security, loss of essential routines, loss of friendships, confidence and, of course, the worst loss of all: loss of life.
But scattered here and there, tucked behind and alongside the wreckage lie some unexpected gifts.
Yet month after month I find myself starting out to compose the RT Inner Circle E-Notes with the clear intention of sending out something light and breezy and easy on the eyes.
And month after month I fail.
Why might that be?
I have some theories.
Because I'm weaning myself from all social media (I decoupled from Facebook after the 2016 election and have occasionally wondered whether I'd made a marketing mistake and so have allowed people to promote my workshops on the platform with serious reservations and angst). Twitter remains a mystery to me. LinkedIn, as I've said before, feels like the Cinderella to the wicked step sisters of social media (FB & Twitter) in that it's more transparent, less sexy and therefore gets most of my attention. Despite the fact that I don't know how many of you actually go there.
So every time I set out to send information about things I think are important in the world of theatre and filmmakers (including but not exclusively limited to workshops of my own) I feel a kind of burden cause I doubt folks are stumbling upon posts of mine on social media.
So that I think contributes to my unconscious need to put every possible dish on the menu on the table. Just in case. God forbid the one person who doesn't eat meat or gluten forgets that I always prepare a rice veggie medley no matter what.
LinkedIn is the Cinderella to the evil stepsisters of social media, Twitter and Facebook. We're not really sure it's going to make it to the ball to meet her match but we sure hope she does. LinkedIn is overt about its purpose. It promotes itself as a professional networking platform. And for this reason, it's a lot kinder and gentler than the evil stepsisters.
Naturally, too, for this reason it's less successful. And it has some quirky sort of obviously missing-the-mark elements that are almost quaint in their cluelessness.
One of these is the message that periodically pops up to suggest we congratulate one of our contacts on their work anniversary.
I, for one, do not track my work anniversaries. Do you?
So whenever I get these odd messages I kind of giggle inside. They're trying to promote connection which I of course applaud. Compared to facebook and twitter it's downright altruistic. But what's inevitably the result? If you think about it, most of the congratulations we're going to receive on our work anniversary are going to be from people we've linked with but have never met. So, in a way, by definition, the "congratulations on your work anniversary" starts to read like a giant name tag that reads: YOU DON'T KNOW ME. BUT I DO CARE.
But last week, I actually found myself marking and celebrating a work anniversary. Labor Day 2021 was the 1st birthday of the Hear Me Out Monologues experiment. Take a look. And thank you to all the earnest, talented and generous writers, actors, musicians, technicians and audience supporters who helped us create the feeling of becoming an audience together via Zoom.
To those of you who've ever entered a Zoom meeting and wondered why some of us can be heard better than others, here at long last is Rolando Teco's answer to the question:
Titles are so important. The title of your play acts as a frame, encouraging the audience to discover connections they might otherwise miss.
In the weeks leading up to each month's Some1Speaking presentation, I meet privately with each playwright to confirm my suspicions as to what lies at the heart of their monologue.
Next our Resident Director, Suzanne Bachner, meets with the artists for one exploratory rehearsal. In this way Hear Me Out Monologues has constructed a pipeline aimed at bringing new character studies to life and in so doing, introducing writers to new audiences by placing the objectives of the writers front and center in everything we do.
Of the 5 monologues being presented tonight,2 have completely changed titles just in the past week as each author came to recognize that the title they'd originally chosen was in some way failing to properly frame the piece they'd written.
The frame suggests ways of interpreting the work of art. So in this way, the title whispers in my ear as the house lights go down. Here are 3 examples:
Recent Comments