Arts in an Age of Technology

I had a “what a great idea” moment this evening which turned to “good idea with reservations” a few minutes later. I will share the idea with you in hopes that someone out there will have the influence with the right people to make this happen (or start up a company to do so).

I got a Valentine’s Day card from my nephew today mailed with a stamp with his picture on it. Apparently, Stamps.com has a service that allows you to place photos on a stamp template and produce legal to use first class mail stamps. The drawbacks are that you pay about $10 for the privilege ($17.99 for 20 vs. 7.80 of the regular kind) and you have to wait for them to be mailed to you.

What popped into my mind was that it would be great if arts organizations could create stamps with images/logos connected with the organization. Not only could the organization use the stamps, but they could make the images available to supporters to use for their own stamps. Given that a lot of greeting cards get mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, the stamps could help support end of the year donation drive with a slew of stamps saying “We Support X Theatre” or some such.

One of the pesky additional problems I mentioned before is that unlike Kodak’s Ofoto.com, Stamps.com doesn’t allow you to store your images online and then allow your friends to access them. You could get around this by emailing images to interested supporters, but then they would have to place the image and format the stamps. It isn’t hard to do, but if you aren’t comfortable with technology, it could be a disincentive.

I wonder if Kodak could get in on this less expensively than Stamps.com. They offer a dozen stickers for $3.00 so 24 would be $6.00, toss on $7.80 for postage and $13.80 is cheaper than Stamps.com with four more stamps. It would just be a matter of arranging for the Post Office’s sanction. Still because you have to wait for the stamps in the mail, it might not be cheap or immediate enough to garner widespread patron support.

It would be really great if people could print out the stamps from their home computers. You can already print out postage without images from your home computer and printer. Probably the only thing holding this back is the fact most people don’t have high enough quality printers at home to produce a decent looking image. Once they do, you will probably see homemade postage become more widespread. It would actually be a little more secure than the current black and white print at home postage which has to be monitored for photocopying.

Of course, will we still be mailing things then?

Back in September Drew McManus wrote about the importance of buying all important variations of your internet domain name address.

I just want to mention the importance of keeping the domain name you got. Within the last month, I visited the site of an agent and a performance group and both had let their name registration lapse.

As a result, no one could make an offer on any of the agent’s performers (especially given that he was on the road) or check out any of the other acts he represents. Nor could he receive any email because his address was his domain name which was now defunct.

For the artist, neither I nor anyone else interested in getting background information on the group could do so. All the information that would support press releases, all the video and music clips and all the pictures that will get audiences excited that the performance is coming to their town–it is all inaccessible. They too were on the road with their manager so getting support materials sent was difficult. Like it or not, the internet is the way prospective clients and patrons research performers and venues.

I contacted both entities pointing out that their internet presence was gone. I discovered in one case, the answer to why it lapsed was fairly simple but it is a cautionary tale for others.

The main reason why domain renewal gets overlooked is because no one is getting the reminders. The people who handle the registry of names are pretty organized and are eager to remind you to renew as far as 90 days before it is due. Because renewal is fairly cheap a lot of people pay for multiple years up front. The problem is, if the person handling those arrangements for your organization leaves and you delete his/her email address, you might never receive the reminders.

The lesson here is insist that the contact person email address be set to something generic like webmaster@yourdomain.org that passes to each new person in that position.

The registry companies will also try to reach you by regular mail too. However, if that address is incorrect or you moved or got a new PO Box and your forwarding has expired, you miss out again. Even if you do get the piece of mail okay, the companies have lot of services they want to offer you so the mail tends to look like junk mail. Especially if it is addressed to a person who worked there a year ago or is addressed generically to Webmaster.

Heck, if you aren’t a tech saavy person, even registering online is confusing. Check out GoDaddy.com . How quickly can you figure out how to register a domain name for the first time? How about renewing it?

Also, another reason to have email go to a generic address that can be passed around. It is two years after the old tech guy left, you don’t know the password for the account associated with your domain name. You can have your password sent of course–but it is going to the old tech guy’s email address which was deleted. (Of course, you could just recreate his email address with your own password, but the example wouldn’t be as scary.)

The worst case scenario is that the domain name is allowed to lapse for so long it goes up for auction and is purchased by someone else who then offers to sell it back to you for $10,000 or more. Though if you go that long before someone points out your website isn’t working, it probably wasn’t helping your organization’s public image and relations to begin with. Or people don’t think enough of your company to point it out.

Came across something a little disturbing yesterday. I don’t remember where exactly. It took me awhile to track it down via Google.

According to the Center for Digital Democracy, phone and cable companies are moving to make every action we make on the internet billable. There is also the possibility that competitors and people espousing views they don’t agree with might be marginalized. Apparently all the money I am paying for my connection isn’t enough for them.

My first thought was that this will probably backfire on them the same way trying to restrict file trading hasn’t really been beneficial for record companies. Yes, they control the methods of communication and that is a lot of leverage. But if there is one thing you can depend on American ingenuity for, it is finding away to circumvent the Man. Some college kid or a municipality or a competitor will see a need to be filled by an alternative.

And if people are faced with the choice of spending a Friday night running the meter on their cable modem or spending some of the same money on a live performance, maybe they choose the live performance, eh?

But assuming that the companies are sneaky and gradually introduce fees so that people will come to accept them, this could also represent a threat to arts organizations. It could become more difficult and expensive to promote your shows via email and digital media than it is now. And what happens if the president of the local cable company is on your competitor’s board and decides to curtail your bandwidth and exposure on the internet ever so slightly?

This isn’t something you want to think about, but probably should keep your eyes on.

I don’t buy or rent a lot of DVDs. I don’t go to the movies all that often, truth be told. It isn’t because I think live performance is superior or anything, it is essentially because growing up in rural New York, we didn’t get out to the movies much. I have never really been in the habit of attending too many movies.

I did read a lot and as such did attend the Lord of the Rings movies when they came out and did ask for the box DVD set for Christmas. Amazon had it on backorder for quite awhile so it just arrived today.

As I was covertly previewing the first five minutes at work today, you know, just to make sure there weren’t any problems with the disk, I got to thinking what a great tool the performers and production team commentary would be for teaching people the basics about the arts.

It would be an expensive undertaking to pull the video production resources together to produce a DVD. However, I think foundations that support audience building and arts education efforts would probably be happy to underwrite the creation of a tool that could be easily duplicated and distributed to serve large numbers of people.

In fact, foundations would probably be more interested in paying for generic educational videos that many organizations could use rather than ones that specifically prepared audiences for shows in an upcoming season.

I think it would be very helpful to people to have the ability to watch a play and then go back and listen to the actors comment on what they might have been feeling during the show (I nearly wet my pants trying not to laugh) or to the director and designers talking about their choices and how it contributes to the feel of the performance.

The same could go for dance and music. A dancer may comment on how their heart soars at a particular place in a ballet even after performing it 50 times or how a piece looks deceptively simple but actually involved hours of practice. Symphonies could break the commentary down by section and conductor, perhaps.

If the commentary was designed well, pointing out what people should look for, explaining the process and providing points of reference to which people can relate, (parallels between elation during performances and sports activities, for example), it could become a powerful educational and intimidation allaying tool.

At the speed with which video can be delivered over the internet, the videos wouldn’t necessarily have to be only available on DVDs at the organization or local library. Arts organizations could have the videos available for download or streaming on their website or on a hosting site specifically designed with the bandwidth to host video.

Heck, maybe the local cable company would be interested in having it in their free video on demand library. Given that they would probably advertise it as a service to their subscribers, the cable company might go as far as add a little bit at the end saying “if you feel like checking out live ballet in your area, here is a listing of companies in your region.”

As I write this, ideas are forming in my head about how it might turn this into a reality. As a presenter, I don’t have an opportunity to do something like this with the groups I bring in because they visit for such a short time. But I do know some local companies that I might inspire and some video production people who might work on it.

Watch this space in the coming months, I might have something to report.