In this episode I speak with award-winning cultural studies scholar, Dr Kirsty Sedgman. We talk about the audience experience - particularly within a digital context, theatre etiquette campaigns, excluded audiences, the democratising potential of digital, and how we understand the 'value' of cultural experiences.
In this episode I speak with award-winning cultural studies scholar, Dr Kirsty Sedgman. We talk about the audience experience - particularly within a digital context, theatre etiquette campaigns, excluded audiences, the democratising potential of digital, and how we understand the 'value' of cultural experiences.
Hello, and welcome to the digital works podcast. The podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector, my name's Ash. And in this episode, episode 15, we have a conversation with dr. Kirsty Sedgman Kirsty is an award-winning cultural studies scholar based at the university of Bristol. Her research asks how audiences find value in cultural participation. Kirsty is the author of numerous academic publications. And her work is featured in outlets like the times literary supplement the guardian and the New York times. We spoke earlier in 2020 ahead of the announcement of the UK government's cultural recovery fund. And we talked about audience experience theater, etiquette campaigns, excluded audiences, the democratizing potential of digital and how we understand the value of cultural experiences. Enjoy. All right, then. So let's just get started. Hi, Kirsty. Thanks very much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Um, I know it's not easy and locked down times when everyone's juggling childcare and homeschooling and working and a hundred, one of the things I've currently got men taking up my garden, which my dogs are not particularly happy about. So apologies if you hear them shouting. Um, but, uh, so today I'm really interested for us to talk a bit about your area of specialism and particularly how that relates to digital stuff. And then what, if anything, um, the past sort of four months of coronavirus related, um, frenzy have shown us in terms of, of how cultural organizations interact and serve their digital audiences. Um, but, but maybe as a starting point, we can zoom out a little bit and start with your, your area of specialism. You know, you have a PhD, you specialize in audience research and cultural value. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what, what does that mean? What does that involve? What are you interested in?
Speaker 2:Well, I am interested in how different people sitting sometimes next to each other, sometimes on sofas, thousands of miles apart can watch the same event unfolding and yet come to such radically different conclusions about what it means. Everything from Brexit to Brexit, I'm fascinated by how people come to understand social situations or performance events in really different ways. So all my research is dedicated to understanding how people find meaning and make value in the things they see.
Speaker 1:And I I'm fascinated with that idea, particularly in a, in a digital context, because it feels like the relationship between the thing and the audience is fairly well, maybe not fairly well, but it is, uh, somewhat of a known quantity in traditional cultural experiences. And when I say that, I mean, when there's a bit of art and people are having it performed at them or experiencing it in the same physical space, but I wonder how well that relationship is sort of perceived or understood in a digital context. What, what, if anything, has your research showed shown us? Let's forget about the coronavirus or in it, but in, in 2020, how broadly do you think that cultural organizations think about or understand that, that digital audience experience?
Speaker 2:I think it's something that cultural organizations around the world are right now being forced to come to grips with in a way that perhaps they haven't needed to in such depth before. So in one sense, of course we can't physically be together right now, but we're starting to realize that that doesn't necessarily mean we can't feel like we're together. So there's a lot of emerging research. That's finding the audiences are often surprised by how live and intimate and co-present digital performances can feel and how sociable it can feel to watch a performance unfolding in real time with a friends or who might be on the other side of the world. But second screening with you via WhatsApp.
Speaker 1:I'm, I'm really interested by that because I've seen some, um, cultural leaders sort of begrudgingly admitting that digital is, is absolutely appropriate, um, as a sort of means of distribution and engagement at the moment because buildings and physical audiences are simply not possible, but they seem to be talking about it as, as a stop gap and sort of something to be put up with until things go in inverted commas, go back to normal. Um, but you know, as someone who consumes stuff digitally a lot, I, I think that there is a real value and in that audience experience, and as, as you say that second screening, however, that happens via Twitter or text message or, you know, live chat or whatever is an interesting sort of additional part of the digital experiences that simply isn't possible for most physical experiences. Um, and how, how much do you think, what's the question I'm trying to ask? How, how different is a digital audience experience in comparison with a physical one or are they so, so different that actually they need to be thought about and talked about and engaged with in entirely different ways?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously it differs from person to person, but some of the earliest research into when theater performances were first being live streamed into cinemas back when it was called alternative content in the early two thousands, some early research by my PhD supervisor, Martin Barker in this great book, he published called live to your local cinema. He found that often people sitting there in the cinema together found themselves forgetting that they weren't at the actual live GAT trickle event. And in some ways he found for some people, they, they actually felt really surprised by how engaged and present they felt there with the, with the actors, even though they were separated by a screen, because of course those kinds of made for filmed reception performances. They do offer things that the live event can't. So you can have closeup shots where you can see actors reactions that only the few people who are able to sit in the front row at the theater would be able to access when we study. And when we make theater, we often tend to get really obsessed with, Oh, it's a word that we use the ontological nature of live performance. The fact that actually, this is what the thing is because the reality of that experience is that you're either there in the space, co-present with the performance, or you're not, you're watching it as a remove and it's not live, and you're not there together with the people who are making the performance happen in front of you. That's, that's an ontological understanding of live performance, but I think we get so obsessed with whether things are or are not live are, or aren't co-present that we forget that actually, we also need to pay attention to how those experiences feel, because sometimes the research is saying that you can be there at home watching a performance happening on screen, either being live into your home, or maybe accessing it at some time later by YouTube. But that, that experience comes for some people in that moment, feel more alive. You can feel more co-present with performance. Then you might, for example, if you were in a giant theater auditorium sitting way at the back behind a pillar and watching tiny figures on stage, so we need to pay attention to both what the performance and the experience actually is like, but also to how it feels to the people who are watching.
Speaker 1:And, and on that point on that sort of the qualitative experience of the individual audience members, regardless of how they're experiencing that thing. How good do you think out of this is probably we're moving to sweeping generalization territory, but how good do you think on the whole, and let's just focus on the UK cultural organizations, but sort of organizations are at, um, understanding and being interested in that audience experience, or would it be fair to say the focus is so much on the, what the thing on a stage is doing that the fact that the audience is there is some thing of a secondary consideration or is that, uh,
Speaker 2:Well, my worry, my big worry with the current situation is that of course, it's going to be likely to be those big companies. The ones who've been given, the most funding who have the best technologies who have been more likely to have prerecorded productions already in stock to a vest to have invested in that technology and those resources that they can then put online now. And there's a danger of course, that this is going to widen already existing divisions between those big organizations and smaller companies who might be making brilliant work, but who haven't been given those resources to show off its brilliance to best effect online.
Speaker 1:And I mean, on that point and sort of referring back to something you've already said, I think that to date how, um, and it has mostly been bigger organizations have looked at delivering the art in a digital context has been around, you know, filming productions and making that available either in cinemas or through platforms like digital theater or now through, you know, like the NT, uh, home YouTube initiative. Um, I w I wonder if, and, and obviously I feel like the audience experience there is perhaps there's a, there's an obvious, uh, perhaps a more obvious line that you can draw between someone sitting in an auditorium, watching a play to someone, sitting in a cinema, or watching a play to someone, sitting at home, watching the same play being filmed. And obviously there, uh, there's a, an evolving change in that audience experience cause they're all experiencing slightly different things. Um, but what, what's my question, I suppose, I'm interested in how digital or how cultural experiences might start to change in a digital context beyond just that the fairly obvious capturing a physical thing anyway, um, and how the audience experience is sort of perceived and understood within that context. I mean, at, at an initial iteration of that might be, um, complicity. And I now can't remember the name of the play that they put online, but it had binaural audio, um, as part of the thing. So, so that they were making use of technology, um, as part of you watching the recording of that play, which had quite a big impact on the audience experience. Um, and obviously yes, the encounter, the encounter, that was the one. And I thought that was an interesting sort of toe in the water of not just capturing, uh, you know, actors on a stage and putting that on a screen. Actually, you were starting to use technology to, to, to affect the audience experience.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We throw that word around that word lie you've around a lot, but actually it means a lot of different things. So national theater life might not be spatially live because you're not co-present with the performance in front of me, but if you're in a cinema, having these things live streamed to you, or if you're at home watching a live stream, then it's going to be temporarily live because it's happening at the same time as you're watching it it's live in terms of time. But if you are by yourself on the safer, that's a really different kind of experience too, if you are in a cinema of watching it together. When I guess we might say it's socially live just like watching football down a pub, but social media and the internet will broadly has also given us other opportunities and perhaps other kinds of liveliness to ways to be socially present whilst we're physically distant for those audiences, of course, who are able to use those technologies. Um, I think there's a stat that 6 million British people don't have, or people in the UK don't have access to the internet in their homes. So we need to understand that that technology is not just bringing us all together and that there are still people who are being shut out of those experiences, but absolutely yes, there are ways to reimagine what theater is or what it could be ways to bring us together. That don't necessarily mean people on a stage performing to other people sitting and watching them. And, um, the UK Europe more broadly has a long history of those kinds of experimentation.
Speaker 1:And I mean, do you, do you think that this requires artistic development in institutions and more broadly to, to, to shift, to evolve in order to be able to sort of in a, in a meaningful way, engage with the fact that the experience they're creating isn't necessarily just for the people in the room, you know, that the room where it happened and actually this thing may be experienced in other ways on other platforms, in other places at other times, does that place additional, or should that place additional demands considerations of the author of those experiences, whoever that author is, choreographer, director, whatever. Um, or do you think actually we shouldn't burden practitioners with that. And it's about bringing in additional expertise around that to help distribute and engage audiences beyond the, beyond the physical performance.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm a university lecturer and I am currently in the process of moving all of my teaching from face-to-face to online whilst looking after two small kids who just want to climb on me and the amount of time and emotional energy it takes to do that. And also the knowledge and the labor, that's a specialist skill, it's unbelievably difficult. So I do think that this is a burden that we might find ourselves unthinkingly placing on artists who might never have wanted to engage in these kinds of ways. But at the same time, it's also an opportunity to dismantle a, an understanding of what the arts should be like that are based on 19th century culture and civilization campaigns that were embedded in white supremacist, Imperial and Imperial desire to civilize the world through culture, but not all culture, only this kind that we have deemed in Macchu Arnold's words, he was a critic, very influential figure, went around Europe, us giving lectures. And he said, we need to introduce audiences did the best that has been thought or said in the world. And of course the question is who's best whose value systems are we talking about? Um, as an audience researcher, I have spent my career trying to understand the power and the pleasure of being in the room together, part of that temporary community, what piece of Brooke calls that those two silences, um, the Supreme moment of communication. He says that moment when people normally divided from one another, by every of natural human barriers, suddenly find themselves truly together in that space, in that moment. And that's your pre-moment. He says expresses itself in something which is undeniably shared. But one of the things that worries me when I hear people, rhapsodizing like I have also done here to some extent about the power and pleasure of being there as Hamilton says in the room where it happens is that I know that not everyone is made to feel welcome in those rooms. And that's what my last book, the reasonable audience studied. I looked at the theoretical campaigns to retrain badly behaved spectators in manners and respect. And through that writing process, I heard from so many people who have been excluded deliberately excluded from Brooks Supreme moment of communication. So those were neurodivergency is like just Tom and her extra live campaign. Uh, those with physical disabilities, for example, or people with caring responsibilities, audiences from marginalized communities who are disproportionately judged and surveilled before they even step inside those rooms. And to some extent re-imagining what theater might be, could also be an opportunity to invite people into those temporary communities who historically have been shut out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it, it does feel that in over the past few months, and I would expect over the coming months and years, we're going to have to shift our understanding of, of sort of how culture happens, because I think there's not going to be an easy or quick return to normality. And I think also there seems to have been, you know, people have identified that actually this moment of chaos and, and stress is, is, uh, is, uh, an opportunity where we can try to change some of the things as you've identified that are rooted in unpleasant realities of a hundred years or more ago. Um, and I think digital, I, I, you know, I'm, I am a digital sort of evangelists that I'm, I'm not going to pretend that digital exclusion isn't, isn't a problem because it is, as you've identified, you know, 10 to 15% of the population in the UK do not have access regular easy access to the internet. Um, there are huge digital deserts in the UK and that's a problem. Um, but you know, more people have a smartphone than engage with culture. So I would suggest that that that is an opportunity. Um, but, but I think as you've also identified, it probably is going to require some at least conversation about what cultural experiences are and could be and how they're perceived, because it still does feel that the, the, as you say, co located live in, in venue experience is Supreme. And then, you know, the digital representation of those experiences are echoes of that rather than being seen as having as much value as is the source as it were.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think we need to understand value, not something as not something that is constructed by performers and artists, and then delivered, taught, insists. It is something that audiences and performers and creative teams create together in and through the moment of performance. And we need to acknowledge and get better at accepting that for some people, the value that they take away from an experience might be totally different to the values that other people have taken away.
Speaker 1:And I mean, yeah, I, I'm interested in that because, you know, I have, I work in the cultural side. We, we know we both spend a lot of time swimming in cultural waters and I'm sure what we have friends who we sometimes take to the theater who absolutely do not come live in this world. Um, and so I always find it fascinating. I've got a friend who works in shipping insurance. He's a, he works in underwriting, um, big tanker ships, piled high with containers. You know, it's, it's as far away from working in the theater as you could get. And I sometimes take him, take him to the theater with me. Um, and I'm always fascinated by, by what his experience is like when we, you know, when we're having a drink afterwards, because it's always completely different to mine. He D he only goes to the theater and I invite him to. And so it's just really interesting to see what he is excited about, what he's confused by what he's baffled by at times what he notices. Um, and, and how I suppose on that topic, on that issue of understanding the rich variety of different experiences that people are having. How good do you think cultural organizations are at understanding and engaging with that?
Speaker 2:My first book was called locating the audience, and that was about how people found value in national theater Wales, as it was coming into being a national theater as it was being born. So all those things that people thought their national theater should be doing, or they hoped they would be doing, and those anxieties and worries and pleasures, all of that came out in that research. And the conclusion that I drew from that book is that one of the big reasons that people get put off from the arts is when they feel that they've been shut out of a conversation. So I spoke to quite a few people who came to see national theater, Wales, his performances, which generally were received really positively in that first launch year. They called it their theater to map of Wales 13 different performances, 13 different places around Wales, often made, made with, and for, and including the voices of, for a lot of those shows the people in those spaces. So they were psyched, responsive performances. And while the people that I spoke to generally really loved the shows, there were of course, people who had hesitations or concerns. And I spoke to people particularly who came to see these performances despite calling themselves a non-expert theater ago. And the words of, one of my respondents, people who didn't see themselves as days ago has been drawn to come in. Some cases travel a couple of hours for these shows because they wanted to see their hometown performed for them. And then sometimes they might feel that they didn't, they couldn't quite understand the version of that place, that they were being shown through these performances. And we got into this really tricky, difficult, circular conversation where people often wanted me to explain what the performance had been doing, because it was too arty, too. Avant-garde too experimental for them. And they felt maybe I don't have the right to judge it because it's national theater, Wells they're professionals. I'm sure they know what they're doing. I'm sure it's just me. That was a phrase that came up again. And again, I'm sure it's just me, but then also circling away from that and go, but this is my place. These are my stories. And my local characters, the people I've been told about my whole life. So maybe I do have the right to judge. And there was a really interesting discursive circling that happened there. So all my work is about paying attention, not just to what people are saying, whether it's, whether it's I liked it, or I didn't like it, or, and then judging the success of shows based on that. That's not what I'm about. That's not interesting. What does fascinate me is how people reach for words to describe experiences that we tend to think of as indescribable and what comes out in and through that discourse. And the conclusion that I drew is that actually theater companies, arts organizations, more generally are actually quite right for less scared of what audiences might say, because they have to prove value. They have to prove people got it, and they loved it. And that they're going to come again. So if people come in with these hesitations or concerns or questions, or a sense that maybe it's not for me, then those voices can actually pose a threat. So we have to be really careful in the arts about how we handle that. Because if we shut those people down and go, yes, you're right. You didn't get it. You weren't engaging with us in the right way. And that's where you didn't enjoy it. Like this person did, then they will feel shut out of that conversation. And they will never come back again.
Speaker 1:And this may be an unfair question, but what do you feel cultural organizations can do to guard against that, you know, to, or, or to, to, to combat that for, you know, I've worked at an opera company and the number one thing we we'd hear when we were talking to people, who'd never been to the opera who may be vaguely intrigued by it, but they were saying, I don't think it's for me. You know, I don't think it's for someone like me and there were a million different things. They were meaning when they said that. But what, what do you think, you know, what strategies have you seen? What activity have you seen? What type of language or whatever it might be. Are there any things that cultural organizations can proactively do to be starting to try to guard against people feeling like that, or actively breaking down that perception?
Speaker 2:I think the most important thing that they can do is something that's very often, they don't real, really have true control over, but wherever possible in the arts, generally we need. And I'm by no means the first to say this, but we need to push back against the idea that value is something that can be quantified, that can be quantified in any meaningful way. So things like as the culture counts initiative, which then transformed into the impact and insight toolkit that the arts council spent millions of pounds getting an external consultant to develop. And that was about asking audiences to rate every show. They see a long-game Lickert scale of success. So it was, risk-taking an original, to what extent do you agree with these statements that it challenged me in those kinds of things? And what we risk doing then is boiling down all of those value systems and the act of making meaning and finding value into a numerical scale where we can say, well, this show was clearly good, and this one was clearly bad, but my research has shown that it's always been the case that people are going to come to the theater and they're going to have totally different value judgements, obviously. So from the 1960s, working in the Bristol university of Bristol theistic collection, the archives there, I was lucky enough to access audience letters. And this is here, a couple of comments that were sent in by audience members through letters, to the director of mice and men, one of the first performances of that. Um, so one person said mice and men is terrific and it's human understanding. And as you say, they say to the director in the latest newsletter, the is almost unbearably poignant. It certainly extends our nerves and mental fibers to the full and someone else wrote it was so obvious that their life together could only end in tragedy that the whole play was impregnated with impending doom, which I simply know it was superbly acted, but why or why must you choose such morbid plays? So in my own work, I sometimes do questionnaires and I sometimes ask people to rate a performance on a similar Likud scale from say, excellent to very poor ask you, how did you find the performance? Tell me, so my question for myself has been, well then how am I avoid eating, falling into that same trap of trying to quantify value and trying to say, okay, well, 70% of the audience for this performance thought it was excellent. Only 40% of that audience. So that show was excellent. That means this is a better show. How am I avoiding doing that? And because for me, I might ask people to give me those ratings, but then I also ask them to fill in a qualitative box that explains their response, because I think that in of themselves, those ratings are meaningless. My excellent like wellbeing, your poor, what interests me are the systems of criteria that people take up in order to articulate why they chose this rating over that. And what I found, looking at another Bristol old Vic production that this one, a recent version of the caretaker, one person rated excellent. And I said, I expect painter to draw out the discomfort and this production did just that excellent acting amazing set. It almost was as if the set was another actor, it wove itself into every scene, whereas somebody else rated it poor and said that that was because the actors did that absolute best or really physically kinetically. But I simply hated the play. I had a feeling of being locked into my seat, into the presence of three people. I disliked involved in a manipulative power play. In fact, they said they sat out the second half in the, in the bar with a beer, but that was, and what I found is that rating the performance awful or poor often hand in hand with questions of power. So rhetorically speaking, the word powerful was often used, but, but with the word butts in front of it, but it was powerful. And that's why I didn't enjoy it. But of course, as artists, isn't that what we want, we want to produce a powerful experience and that doesn't know,[inaudible] always have to translate into a powerfully positive experience. Sometimes negativity can be powerful and great and effective. And what we need to get better at is resisting those narratives that say, or, or the arts council mandates the governmental urges to make us only snapshot the most strongly positive success narratives. Sometimes success needs to be thought about more widely than just the most positive stuff.
Speaker 1:And, and on that, that, that final, that final point. How do you think what's my question, I suppose my question is how should coach will organize it? Because I think that, you know, w when, if, and when government support comes in for the sector, or if, and when theater start to reopen, I think that the, uh, focus is going to be on people trying to recoup, you know, four to six to 12 months lost revenue. And so therefore they will, um, you know, there'll be programming shows that are, you know, bankers, as it were, you know, they feel that, that going to be an easy sell, which could crowd out. I've seen some people worried about crowding out new, uh, crowding out in complex riskier work, how, and I think the sector is either, you know, it seems to oscillate between being very, very good at thinking about and measuring impact and, and evaluating the work that it's done, and then very, very bad and stuff just happens. And then that people barrel onto the next thing. Do you have a framework or recommendations about how people should be looking to measure and evaluate the work that they do when it comes to particularly when it comes to audience experience?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's going to be an extraordinarily difficult time, no matter what happens next for theaters and for people working in the arts. So I am wary of drawing my own definitive judgments about what people who are very good at their jobs should be doing. However, what I will say is it's extremely clear from everything that has happened over the past couple of years, that what the arts desperately needs a broader, more representative range of people empowered to make those key decisions. Because if value is, is culturally coded and is a personal thing and is embedded in, I'm going to say that to him again, in white supremacist models of social and cultural value, then obviously some works are going to seem more of a risk and to be judged unfairly, or in ways that in ways that small representative decision-makers might be able to capitalize on, I think that we need to get away from that narrative of work, being a risk and think about who gets to judge what counts as risky.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that, um, that chimes with other speakers that I've heard talking about, particularly talking about audiences and pointing out the phrase hard to reach audiences, and they made the point that, that, you know, these audiences, aren't hard to reach. You're just not, you know, you're not giving them any reason to reach you or for you to reach them. It might be hard to reach, um, you know, a particular audience. If you're trying to reach them with a play that has no relevance to their lives, or, you know, they don't see themselves in what you're trying to, to reach them with.
Speaker 2:And it's not just about what gets programmed, it's about the values of these spaces themselves. So they have been historically deliberately designed to be off-putting to anyone with non-normative bodies and behaviors to people with neurodivergence is to audiences of color, to working class audiences, to younger audiences. And we need to pay attention to the power and how that's operating within those spaces and how it is located, both in the workforce and the people who are surveilling and paid to police audiences, but also at audiences themselves, we need to look at who is policing the behaviors of other people and potentially making people feel unwelcomed in spaces. We say, we say all the time that we want people to feel at home in the arts, in our buildings, but what are we actually doing to let them feel that they are at home? Because often when people try to act like they're at home, like opening a crisp packet, then they get told this space is not for you or jukebox musical singing along. It's called a jukebox musical who gets to decide what modes or methods of behavior counters reasonable. That's what my, my latest work has been all about instead of interrogating, who gets to make the rules, who they've been designed to benefit and who loses out,
Speaker 1:I wonder, again, throwing a digital lens on that is, do you see examples of that sort of behavior in a digital sphere? Are there norms starting to be defined and enforced around how a digital audience should engage with digital experiences? Or is it still so sort of fresh out of the oven and malleable that, that structure hasn't started to fossilize around it in quite the same way?
Speaker 2:Amazingly, I was part of an online conference talk awhile ago. Um, so about three weeks ago and one of the lovely things though, so it was the first of all, I could actually attend it because with two kids, I don't like just can't easily hop on a train and leave for a day without having to put a whole chain of events in motion that involved grandparents and extending and extending school clubs and things like that. So I could go to this conference event just by nipping upstairs for an hour. That was the main thing. But also the other really lovely thing was that we were having a conversation in the chat while the speaker amazing speaker was giving this brilliant presentation, we were discussing it. And we were connecting the things that she was saying to our daily lives and to our experiences and to our research. And then somebody pipes up to say, I think you should stop typing now. And we should just listen quietly because this is very disrespectful. And I lost it because this is one of the great affordances of the digital environment we can, we can engage in, in what Berea called relational aesthetics, where, where you can actually talk to each other about the thing that we're watching, rather than just receiving it, being expected to absorb it. And then only later being permitted to go and discuss, we can do those things at the same time. It's a really complicated and quite wonderful balancing of our attention and a redefinition of what our attention stands actually mean. That's great, but the desire to police and control other people's behavior, even in this entirely different. So new social contract that still, these are still really powerful. There's old norms. And I want to urge us all to think about what's really good and new and exciting about the digital environment, rather than trying to pretend that we are in that room all together, because then all we're doing is creating a lesser shadow of an event that we used to have. Perhaps we need to embrace the new digital affordances that were being offered.
Speaker 1:And I think that is an absolutely perfect place for us to end. Um, thank you so much for all of your incredibly well articulated, um, thinking on this, I think it's so such an interesting area, and certainly for people like me who were interested in how digital intersects with, with how digital experiences exist in the cultural space. I think there's so much there to think about, and it is what I find it very exciting because it is all so new. Um, and that, you know, we can make something new and exciting and different and better. And we don't have to, as you say, just try and create a facsimile of that physical experience.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me.