Turn That Thing Off! Collaboration and Technology in 21st-Century Actor Training by Rose Burnett Bonczek, Roger Manix, and David Storck (review)

Anyone offering up a criticism of smartphone and social-media culture potentially leaves themselves vulnerable to accusations of being out of touch or technophobic. The authors of Turn That Thing Off! Collaboration and Technology in 21st-Century Actor Training have taken great pains to situate themselves as anything other than these. In their introduction, each of the three authors gives a brief account of their own relationship to technology and how it has enriched their personal and artistic lives. Yet they all agree that in the last decade or so, they have noticed troubling shifts in the behavior of their acting students that reflect how our culture has shifted away from face-to-face (and toward digital) communication. Bonczek, Manix, and Storck offer these shifts as their reason for coming together to write this book, which asks how changing communication habits are affecting the student actor’s ability to live in the moment and form ensembles, and what can be done about it.

The multiple authorship of Turn That Thing Off! reflects the value that the text places on collaboration. Three of the book’s six chapters are centered around what the authors call “the collaborative gene,” which is a term they use to refer to humanity’s innate “yearning to connect” (13). Chapter 1 describes the behaviors caused by the collaborative gene and how they are essential to the work of the actor. Chapter 2 details observations the authors have made that lead them to believe that the collaborative gene is underdeveloped in recent cohorts of student actors. Chapter 5 suggests exercises and policies on how acting teachers can reignite the collaborative gene within their students, the most radical of these being weekly “digital disconnects,” where students are required to abstain from using their devices for an extended period of time and to report on their experiences. Their coinage of the term relies upon a colloquial use of the word gene, as most of the data they cite throughout the book come from social science rather than geneticists. Nevertheless, it creates a helpful shorthand for the behaviors this trio of authors argues has receded in recent years, and not just in young people. Bonczek and colleagues demonstrate a commitment to their own brand of collaboration in their text through consistent use of a first-person-plural narrative point of view throughout, with occasional sidebars in a first-person-singular voice that give each author space to relate their own anecdotes.

In between, the book focuses on how technology can reduce our ability to connect and collaborate, and why people choose isolation over collaboration. In chapter 3, the authors demonstrate the habit-forming properties of smartphone technology, and the adverse effects of these habits on our social relationships. This is done primarily through a narrative parable that places a young woman and her teenage nephew in abusive romantic relationships with their mobile devices, which are given human names and qualities. Perhaps it feels somewhat retrograde that each character’s cellphone is gendered so that the relationships conform to heteronormative coupling structures, but the parable is interspersed with compelling data from a wide variety of studies indicating that our devices are designed to keep us glued to the screen in anticipation of updates. Although they are careful to emphasize that they are not medically qualified to declare our relationship to these devices an addiction, the authors note how the physical and emotional symptoms these studies point to closely resemble those attributed to substance abuse.

If chapter 3 offers a gloomy perspective on what smartphone culture does to interpersonal relationships, the authors use the following chapter to show why acting students, who should be more invested in developing and understanding human relationships than their peers might be, are especially susceptible to being seduced into isolation by these devices. Among the reasons for this susceptibility are that the story-driven structure...