Starting the #stir
So this weekend I had kind of a #stir revelation. For those who don’t pay attention to our Twitter account (and shame on you for doing so), #stir is the hashtag for the Share The Information Revolution that got rolling last week. In our post about it, we mowed through the various positive effects that new media could have with information sharing as well as pointing out some of the negatives.
One of the big negatives slapped me in the face this weekend. On Twitter I proposed that creating an online demand for that information was the first step towards better information sharing. Then one of my friends informed me that she was probably moving to the Bay Area because “there’s nothing to do around here”. It kind of brought me down from the information sharing high I was still on from the previous night where I’d attended a house party a majority of the attendees were invited to via Facebook and got the address by texting the promoters the day of. There was clearly something to do in Stockton that night.
Then, kind of all at once, it hit me. Stockton’s information problem isn’t that they’re doing a poor job getting the information out to the populace, it’s that we as a populace are doing an even shittier job giving information back.
The notion that nothing’s going on in Stockton isn’t a new by any means. We’ve been pointing that out for the better part of a year and it’s pretty much Save Our Stockton‘s entire platform. The point is, even with as much progress as Stockton has made entertainment-wise recently, there really still isn’t that much to do.
Of course, there are things to do in Stockton, it’s just that they seem so focused on one small sect of the community that the rest of the community long became apathetic to pretty much everything the city does. Part of that’s the city’s fault, these events are ironically meant to appeal to the largest sect of the community. They’ve just become so out of touch with the community that they have no idea what will get us out anymore. So they focus on family-oriented events because parents are always looking for ways to entertain their kids that requires little effort on their part. Plus, kids are heads. The more kids you get out the more heads you can count the bigger a success your event is. The fact that families are more consistent voters just happens to be a coincidence, swear.
But with city leaders living in that mainstream cocoon for so long, they’ve missed the fact that their idea of fun events have shifted away from what a majority of Stocktonians enjoy (they’re like a bunch of mini-Fitzys).
Stockton isn’t mainstream. I’ll just get that out there now. Stockton is such a diverse community that trying to appeal to a majority share just isn’t working because there is no real majority. So promoters/bookers/whatever are left to guess what we want when they get badgered by people like IFG’s Stephen Grossman to come to our venues.
The result? We get shit like Larry the Cable Guy, the corpse of Bob Dylan, and most recently, Dat Phan. Dat Phan is a horrible, one-note comedian, but he was here last week and promoters were forced to advertise this shitty act to us (we’ll get to credibility again in a sec). Aside from the Dylan megashow, nobody really wants to see these acts.
The Larry the Cable Guy show was used as an example of a show where city employees took advantage of otherwise unused seats. The big story should be “We booked a majorish national act that nobody came out to see so we gave away tickets”. Instead it was used as a throwaway example of an ethically questionable practice. Nevermind the fact that if the demand for Larry the Cable Guy was actually there then there would never have been seats to giveaway in the first place.
Sadly, it’s not really their fault. It’s kind of our fault. As a city we seemed to have all just agreed that not going to these events was enough of a sign that they need to put on better events. The city had planned for that with city employees’ aforementioned turn as seat fillers, but once that ended the main call for action was “book mainstream acts”. Which is fine enough on its own until you remember that the city has no idea what mainstream for us is. Plus, we have to compete with 3 other cities for all the really good acts.
So yeah, the “book good acts” thing was a little too vague. We need to be more specific with what we tell the city we want because I was wrong. We can’t create demand. That’s short sighted. If we could just create demand this site would be doing this site as our jobs, posting 4 times a day, and have it be chalk full of ads. We need to find where the demand is and go there, and the only way we can find out where the demand is is by telling people what we want.
We haven’t been doing that. We’ve been bitching, endlessly. We’ve lost credibility to bitch to the city about what we want because all we do is piss and moan, and the city’s lost credibility with us because it stopped asking long ago and just started building whatever shit they wanted. We’re at an information stalemate. #stir is a way to try and end that.
But we have to do it smartly. We can’t just use new media to promote the events we have now. The events we have now are relatively well promoted. #stir can’t just be a simple porting of that information to a new medium. The net crowd isn’t that easy. Regardless of what newspapers tell you, credibility is everything on the internet. If we push events the younger new media crowd doesn’t want to see, they will tune us out. Kids are disrespectful little shits like that.
No, the first step is to find out what they want. We can do that through new media, but as always it has to be used in compliment to other ways. You can’t just look up shows online, we have to actually go to them.
I learned this weekend that kids just want to dance to loud techno music even if there’s so many people in house it feels like a sauna. I learned earlier this year that KRS-ONE can sell out the Matinee with less than a week’s notice and minimal advertisement. Years ago I learned that you can fill the Fox/Bob Hope Theatre with Too Short fans and that most of them will leave when Chingy (the headliner, oh, and remember him?) shows up. We’re not a Chingy town, we’re a Too Short town. But if you only look at ticket sales you’re not going to find that out.
Improved sharing of information is something this town sorely needs, but before we get to that we need to get better information to share. We have that information, we just haven’t been doing a great job of articulating it. If #stir’s going to be worth a damn, have to have that demand, so let’s tell them what it is. That’s where we should start.
Reclaiming the Title 