Regent University’s Theater Dept. tried something interesting: blend Shakespeare’s As You Like It with modern technology using texting, Twitter and Ning. As we entered the theater audience members were told they could subscribe to the text messages, follow the Tweetstream, or participate on a Ning. As interesting as the concept seemed to be it ended up being an epic failure.

Issue #1: In order to receive the text messages, which we were told would include explanations of Shakespeare’s “archaic” language and jokes, we were told to text a keyword to a specific number. Should’ve been simple, right? Right, unless you were an iPhone user and/or AT&T subscriber; in that case you were greeted with the words “No Service”! A bit hard to send or receive texts that way.

Issue #2: Use of Twitter=#EPIC FAIL. While the intentions were promising the execution was poor. Unfortunately, the producers or directors (or whoever’s bright idea this was) clearly did not understand how Twitter works or how Tweeters use it. The instructions read: To follow the conversation on Twitter, follow ayliregent. As a TweetDeck user I tried at first to follow using a search string–which worked for the first few tweets since “ayliregent” were included; however, after about a half hour of no tweets I went searching for the problem and found that “ayliregent” was not in fact a stream but was a user. So, rather than creating a stream in which audience members could participate, we were left only to receive canned messages being pushed to us by the user ayliregent. (A quick review of “ayliregent’s” stream for the past shows proved a verbatim copy of the tweets we received.)

Bothersome, but not all together unexpected given the venue, were the content of many of the posts. Shakespeare’s more saucy bits were white-washed and many of the tweets included biblical references (see sample tweets below). Apparently it was also important for audience members to know that Shakespeare was Christian–as evidenced by the direction via tweets to various webpages. I am a Christian—although not of the Pat Robertson variety—and this propaganda-like pushing of a Christian agenda was very off-putting even to me.

Overall, I think the idea had merit and could have been very interesting, but the execution was poor—due mostly to a limited understanding of how to use the technology.