When I first took over editing the Praxis Theatre website in 2008, the thearosphere as I knew it was bustling and largely made up of North American bloggers and also The Guardian website. Blog posts would routinely have thirty or more comments, and the creators were familiar with one another and the arguments and ideas they were presenting.
Fast-forward seven years and the theatrosphere is something else entirely. This legacy can be understood in how so many sites, including this one, use WordPress as their content management system. Websites are now so much more than an online printing press for text with some static images this evolution began with. The Web 2.0 revolution has brought a fragmented, algorithmic, heavily interactive mode of expression that includes many more voices, but each in a silo determined by privacy settings and circle of humans one publishes to. This edition attempts to capture these ‘micro-blogs’ that have become the new medium, in an older iteration of the same medium.
What have we lost and what have we gained through this process?
