I’m a proud Bay Area native and longtime Silicon Valley resident, but an unlikely start-up entrepreneur. Coming out of San Jose State’s theatre department, and just a bit too old to be a digital native, I didn’t use my first computer until after my stint at SJSU. I didn’t even have an email address until 1997.
I was an actor, a singer, a lover of all things liberal arts, a math-phobic shunner of STEM…a #theatregeek, not a true geek.
As a theatre geek, I believe the arts serve an essential function in society. They celebrate our shared humanity and spotlight the joys and challenges of the human condition. Live theatre allows us to experience this awakening and catharsis as a collective.
Times are tough for arts organizations. It’s hard not to fear the impending demise of such shared experiences. Even in this valley of affluence, the San Jose Repertory Theatre, for example, has been allowed to die.
As a San Jose Rep subscriber myself, I am disappointed. As the board member for a San Francisco theatre, I’m concerned.
Now that I am a tech geek too, with blogging as my gateway drug, I know that online content and community serve essential societal functions, too. Technology and limitless entertainment options have had a role in the decline of the traditional arts, but frankly, they were fighting for a mainstream audience long before social networking or streaming video came along.
I can’t consider that role without also acknowledging that technology born here in Silicon Valley is also responsible for creating an entirely new mechanism for connecting, sharing, and yes, creating art inspired by both the gifts and burdens of the human condition.
It’s true I come with a bias.
I have the bias of someone who met her partner online via Match.com 15 years ago, and of someone who joined two dozen friends in a private Facebook group this year to raise money to help another friend, down on her luck. Many of us had only met our mutual friend in-person once or twice, if at all.
Facebook, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, is just one of many ways the online world allows us to erase the boundaries of geography, class, age, and more. Like great art does, really.
This week, thousands of attendees descend upon San Jose to celebrate BlogHer’s own 10th anniversary. They come to enhance their technical skills and network, but we hear over and over that they are primarily here to connect and be a part of something bigger than themselves.
They are here to talk about social justice and how tech can promote it. They are here to convene in person with their online tribe. And they are here to touch and see each other, to hug, laugh and cry, and to commend each other for the beautiful, artful, original, creative ways they express themselves online, making art and truth and history out of their lives.
As community member Casey Carey-Brown put it: “My community lives in my phone. They take care of me and love me and let me love them.”
We come together, online and off, to celebrate, to bear witness, to tell our stories, and find ourselves in the stories of others. Technology can bring humans together. Create a new collective. Shine a different kind of light on the human condition. Let’s embrace and encourage it.
And then maybe leverage it to crowdfund a new theatre company for San Jose.
Elisa Camahort Page is co-founder and COO of BlogHer. She wrote this for this newspaper.
