With regards to the “boring” comment… I am reminded of an exercise my playwrighting teacher at Concordia gave us. He asked us to come into class with an example of something that we enjoy even though it is generally considered “bad”, and an example of something we didn’t enjoy even though it is generally considered to be “good”. Then he asked us to articulate why we did, or did not like these things. I think I talked about my love of The Young and the Restless. He thought, seeing as though we were going to be sitting around a table for several weeks dissecting each other’s work, we ought to be able to articulate why we do and don’t like certain things, beyond “I liked it” or “it was boring”. So, some of us in these audiences have had that kind of training, or we’ve picked it up through our experiences working on collaborative projects. For others in the audience, we were, perhaps, asking them to do something they generally never do. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see what might happen if we started asking them all the time? I’m sad you missed the show too… you missed one hell of a Q&A. I may be biased, but it’s the best Q&A I’ve ever taken part in.

I’m sure Aislinn has some of her own thoughts on this, but from my POV you are right that simplistic one word blurting is not a sophisticated way to engage in feedback. I put the blame for that squarely on myself as director though. The flat screen TVs the texts went to weren’t big enough to see from past the 6th row because the text on the screen was too small. This meant folks were texting into a black hole so to speak, with no context as to what anyone else was doing (unless you had a smartphone). Next time we have to make sure everyone can be dialed into what is happening.

Interesting that you bring up reality TV though because the other technology we looked into for this was the iclicker:
http://elearning.uvic.ca/iclicker
A lot of universities including U of T and U Vic use this now – it was originally designed as the thingys contestants on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire used to poll the audience.

Also – John Tory is hosting a series of Town Hall meetings across Toronto about making changes to the Toronto Transit Commission. Apparently the audience will be given some sort of device to express their (feelings/thoughts?) as the meeting progresses. I don’t know where I’m going with this other than to say lots of different industries are looking for ways to bring technology into a public gathering to enhance the goals of the presentation.

I’m struck by the idea of feedback, and I smell a dangerous possibility in the texting thing which you hint at here: that you are creating “reality theatre” open an audience that has been “American Idolized”, and sees any request for feedback as their moment to vote or judge. I think what you’re after is a conversation, not a blanket judgement. Someone who texts “boring” is perhaps honest, but fails to actually ATTEND the experiment, and reflect on what they see before declaiming. Putting the audience itself onstage highlights a fact that all theatre makers struggle with: a good audience is hard to find.
Did you guys research how editing-on-the-fly is done in talk radio?