On NPR today I heard an interview with someone talking about how Corona Virus might affect the entertainment industry. Her analysis rang true. She suggested that all the Zooming we’ve been doing will start showing up everywhere for the next few years just as it did in the superlative SNL skit about the Trump graduation address last Saturday…..uploaded here a few posts ago.
As an example she mentioned the Toronto Symphony conductor who had all his home bound orchestra members play their individual parts at home to be stitched together for a production of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and the lovely melody Tis a Gift to be Simple.
I watched it immediately and it was very nice but a little jarring since choirs and orchestras really need to listen to each other to give a blended performance. But after this a recommendation showed up from a TED talk about the choir director who pulled this off on a grand scale some years ago. I found the video beautiful and uplifting:
And all this has me thinking of a silver lining to the economic and emotional wreckage this pandemic is causing. I think it will hasten real positive change in education, business and communications all over the map. At the moment, China is light years ahead of the west in its internet coordination (and spying on) its citizens. They are addicted to their cell phones and don’t seem to care about the spying because it makes life so convenient. I hope Corona Virus provokes a similar but less oppressive growth in the Internet age. I hope its not the “Internecine” Era (destructive to all sides of a conflict) but rather the Internetocene (age of the internet) kind of like the “Anthropocene” (geologic age of change due to humans) only for the better.
