Marketers, when they hit, can identify the seed of a product, service or organization and plant it in fertile soil where it will grow like mad. They can tease out the implications of the object they're charged with publicizing or find the motif that others are most likely to riff on. But when they fail, they can fail in the most mortifying fashion. All around the country, the marketing staff at live performance spaces big and small are embracing the "youthquake" in the grooviest way I've seen in years. They are offering up "tweet seats" to the kids.

It is an operatically stupid idea.

I used to work for a Large Regional Theater. I was hired to revolutionize their relationship to the new technology they had started to see bruited about in the columns of business magazines. (There used to be business magazines.) Social media. Well, I should have realized a moribund factory of art that had just started using "e-commerce" would soil their artistic britches over any medium that allowed patrons to say vile and hurtful things. Like, "meh." I lasted three months.

Now, only five years later, social media is all the rage. And it's being done in a manner so clumsy it literally stopped my breath when I first heard about it. Dampen your shame reflex, people. I'm about to tell you about "tweet seats."

These are sections of a live theater or performance space’s seating set aside for audience members who wish to tweet on their phones or tablets during the performance. They are being advertised as safe harbor for the twitterati, where pulling out your gizmo is celebrated instead of frowned upon. The seats are often located in the back row of the seating area.

From Godspell on Broadway to the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, the general managers and marketing leads at performance arts spaces have drank the Kool-Aid. Now, social media is going to save theater.

Beep boop beep

Social media is the cure for exactly nothing. It's a tool and, like a screwdriver, it can be used to access that which is hidden and it can be used to gouge someone's eye out.

More than most, business people—and this includes those in the business of the arts—are resistant to change. When that resistance is finally overcome, they all lurch crazily forward en masse, knocking all the china off the shelves, making a mess of things.

Twitter will not solve your problems. It won't solve your declining patronage. It won't update your unhip image. It won't make your aging subscriber base young again. Worked as part of a coherent strategy, by a staff and creative leadership that is not petrified by the very things that social media enforces (two-way communication, natural voice, access), it can certainly help. But as long as the generation of art tyrants who have the nation's theater in crabby lock-down retain their positions, this is unlikely to happen. Their attitude of artistic exceptionalism is a product of an anti-commercialist, arts-for-arts sake origin that went horribly off the rails somewhere along the line, until, today, criticism of any type is interpreted as philistinism. So, instead of an opening up, we'll have twitchy cure-alls like "tweet seats" sweeping the nation, failing and then being disavowed.

Oh, and you who waved the flag for this? You're going to lose your jobs.

Kids tweet the darnedest things!

Twitter is used by some young people. But it's not a young person's tool. It trends toward people in their thirties. (Granted, in most theaters, the advent of an uncoerced 30-year-old patron would be like Charlize Theron walking on purpose into a Thom McAn's.) It's also profoundly patronizing. Young people, we all know (if we're old and work in Big Theater) like the rap music and are crazy for them durned ding-a-ling machines. If we give them a playpen and condescend to their fetish for technology (you know, give baby a rattle), they'll come rushing, clutching fistfuls of cash, to see the latest so-so production of Our Town.

There are only two things you can do to get young people to come to your theater. First, do not drag out the corpse of another Aunt Dan and Lemon. Enough, for the love of God, with the staples of regional theater. In theater, playing it safe is a bullet to the head. Kids can smell doilies and dust a mile away. Sorry, I meant people can do that. Do interesting stuff and do it well. That can be Murder in the Cathedral. But it can also be The Book of Mormon or Cowboy Mouth.

If kids don't have a sense of ownership and theater doesn't produce a sense of wonder for them, they won't come. In that respect, they are much like people. And Twitter won't help. The transformation most theaters require is not a superficial one of "tweet seats." It's elemental. It's hard. And for most, it won't happen.

On the boards

In much the same way that the Internet is not theater, theater isn't the Internet. It is not even Roland Barthes' infinitely enterable and exitable text. It's immersive and transformational. It requires an end of distraction. My own personal definition of theater is "poetry, extended into three dimensions." Distractions collapse that extra dimension. Even if you buy Brecht's idea that breaking the transportive elements of theater will return you to the ideas it contains, I doubt the blue glow of screens and the pecking and swiping of keyboards would qualify as a political act.

If theater is worth anything, it is worth two hours of translation of self into the words, conflicts and motivations of others. When you marry your intellect and emotion to the true efforts of actors and stage professionals you can walk out feeling purged, high, reenergized. You can walk out with new ideas to consider and new issues to discuss.

Anyone who has ever written creatively, or who has spent time as a scholar or even (on a good day) a journalist, can attest to the impracticality of allowing the coalescence of moment or the pursuit of argument to be interrupted. I don't mean interrupted by a noise or sight that takes you off the track your imagination is traveling, although there is that. I mean the interruption of using a different part of your mind or using your mind in a manner antithetical to the state that was allowing you to create. Participating as an audience member in theater is no different than writing in that it requires the freedom to fly through that space on the stage with the actors.

I am an enthusiastic and long-term user of Twitter (@curthopkins) and I love the theater. But tweeting during a play is like eating corn on the cob in a truck stop bathroom. It's just gross.