“Talk” by Johnathan Biggins (Sydney Theatre Company Production)

(photo: James Green, Sydney Theatre Company) 

I was lucky enough to watch Sydney Theatre Company’s current production of “Talk” by Johnathan Biggins. Talk not only references the diverse range of media complexities but modern journalism and the “24-hour-news cycle” that is so common nowadays with platforms such as facebook and twitter. It follows the story of John Behan, a radio talk-back host with his own show. After controversial topics stated in his previous on-air show the day before, the police interfere and have a warrant for his arrest. After locking himself in his studio – twitter “explodes” (as so rightly noted by the young UTS intern who is working at the Guardian). I found this particularly interesting for the media course as it rightly showed the contrast between old media and new media. The characters of Taffy (a media guru who has been at the Guardian for thirty-five years) versus the intern, Danni (grown up around social media, straight out of university) shows this contrast greatly; Taffy focusing on ‘digging deep into the journalism story’ whilst Danni focuses on ‘skimming the surface, revealing the story rather than the truth’. Hearing this and watching these particular characters play out their differences made me reflect on how much the media (in particular journalism) has changed – the reference that Taffy makes to getting to the truth of a story is something that journalism does not really follow nowadays in my opinion. With the likes of twitter, video streaming (eg: youtube), Instagram and facebook, news can be traveled around the world in a split second – way before a journalist can sit down and write a story. This “easy accessible medium” is why I am personally studying media in the first place.

Linked is the Sydney Theatre Company’s Q+A with the director, which I found particularly interesting – learning the outlooks of why he focused on the fast paced technological world compared to the traditional media world, specifically his outlook on the internet, Web 2.0 and the positive and negatives of what has come from that.