Yeah, that's me. And in real life my shoulders are actually quite straight.

Ignorance about technology does not mean technology is irrelevant.

This may sound self-serving coming from the editor of a trade magazine that helps people understand and use theatre technology, but it needs to be said, so I’ll say it: Stop bashing theatre technology.

Thanks to the increasing presence of multimedia in theatre productions, and pushed into prominence thanks to the very public, outrageous—and seemingly continuing—accidents on the Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, theatre “technology” has become a bit of a whipping boy lately. But—while absolutely affirming that these accidents were horrific, absolutely unacceptable, and an anathema to creating a safe space where art can flourish—these accidents seem to have spurred a rising sense of “technology is the death of true theatre.”

So let me say: Please stop couching your ideas about what a play should be, or how a play should be presented, behind completely arbitrary assertions like “the more we become digital beings, consumers of technological goods…the less human we are” (Britney, on bfg: keeping it real) or “Any story worth telling can be told by one person with a chair, and the chair is optional.” (David J. Loehr on the 2AM theatre blog.)

Yes, vaulting a person through the air over an audience using state-of-the-art winches, cables and computers to control the performers' flight path is technology. But the printing press used to pass along scripts is technology, too. For that matter, writing is technology. (Go read your Socrates if you think it isn’t.) (And yes, I know exactly what I did right there.)

Telling a story is technology. If you can study a process, if it has a methodology, then it is technology. Technology is nothing more than using tools or techniques to create something. Whether that is designing a new computer chip that displays Facebook pages more quickly, learning the best way to make a live speech to convince others of the correctness of your thinking, or even coming together to rehearse and develop skills that make for a better performance, this is all technology. How many times have you heard that hackneyed (though no less true) phrase that an actor’s instrument is their body? If the body is an instrument—a tool—than learning how to act is learning how to use technology.

Just because certain technologies have been around longer, and feel as if they are part of “humanity,” does not mean it has always been thus. If you do not understand a new technology, do not dismiss it as inhuman, or unimportant, or frivolous. Learn it. Learn how to use it. Learn how it can be best applied. And if you feel it isn’t being applied correctly, or could be done better, then speak to that.

But if you still can’t be bothered to learn the language around a new technology, then respect those who have. Understand that yes, the new technology is going to disrupt yours, and demeaning, dismissing, or devaluing the new technology will not make it go away. Pandora is opening that darn box every single day. The only productive way to deal with it is to fall back on the very old technology of learning how to work with people with different skill sets than yourselves; to fall back on the old technology of creating a vision, and interacting with others to create something greater than all of you combined.

And meanwhile, stop bashing theatre technology.