BEIRUT: We live in an information age. At the click of a mouse, Internet users can watch Yehudi Mehuhin playing Niccolo Paganini’s Concerto No. 1 or, if you prefer, several hundred Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

In his latest book “The Information,” James Gleick describes how, in 1949, the U.S. Library of Congress was the largest depositor of memory with around 100 trillion bits of information. Now, such an amount of information can be shoehorned into a modestly sized disc-drive.

Most often, the Internet and the information explosion it has enabled is touted as a utopian tool for the advancement of humankind, whether it be the role of social networking sites in recent political revolutions or for the Internet’s potential capacity to replace human memory entirely – as Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, would have us believe.

“Certainly,” says Brin in a Newsweek article, “if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Recently, however, a rash of books and articles have expressed unease concerning the effects of the information flood.

In his recent book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr deploys neuroscientific research to show that the Internet is altering our thinking patterns and our memory banks for the worse.

In an article for the New York Review of Books on the Wikileaks phenomenon, Christian Caryl sees the vast amounts of data available on the net as an “amoral, technocratic void.”

Against the backdrop of such debates it seems unthinkable, even scandalous, that something could be insufficiently documented.

Nonetheless, such information gaps exist. A group of dramaturges and academics gathered at Tayouneh’s Sunflower Cultural Center to debate the documentation of theater in Lebanon Sunday afternoon. Under the title “Theater and Authentification – Problems and Borders,” participants explored the dearth of information about theatrical productions in this country and proposed tentative solutions.

Coinciding with World Theater Day, Sunday’s seminar was the centerpiece of the “50 Years 50 Days” festival currently unfolding at the venue.

The festival pays tribute to the work of directors Mounir Abu Debs, Antoine and Latifa Multaqa, Raymond Gebara and Yaakoob Shadrawi. All reached their creative peak in the 1960s and 1970s, a period now referred to as the “golden age” of Lebanese theater.

It is this period in particular for which there is a lack of records, according to Sunflower associate Akram Rayess, who opened the session with a short presentation.

Lebanon’s 1975-90 Civil War, it seems, is responsible for the information scarcity of the golden age. Records were scattered, destroyed and lost during the conflict and much material remains to be accounted for.

Rayess harked back to a 1971 conference at the Lebanese Theater Center, where participants unanimously agreed to found an audiovisual library for the country’s theatrical heritage and art. These plans, of course, never came to fruition. Sunday’s seminar might be seen as an attempt to pick up the threads of that conference.

Arnold Chabrol, currently working on his Ph.D. thesis on the sociology of Lebanese theater between 1992 and 2005 at the University of Provence in Marseilles, spoke about contemporary documentation processes.

Modern technology, Chabrol informed his audience, such as relatively cheap video cameras and, of course, the Internet, makes it much easier to document performances.

He described how research and documentation has become an essential part of theatrical practice for contemporary performers such as Rabih Mroueh and companies such as Zoukak.

Documentary filmmaker Mohammad Soueid – “Civil War” (2002) and “How Bitter my Sweet!” (2009) – spoke of state broadcaster Tele Liban’s recordings of Lebanese theatrical productions during the golden age.

According to Soueid, the organization is no longer interested in archiving for the sake of archiving and, moreover, lacks funds to properly maintain its films of performances from the 1960s and 1970s.

Actor, director and writer Mohammad Kreim, who has lectured on media and documentation at the Lebanese University, spoke on yet another method of documentation – radio.

Harking back to the golden age once more, Kreim described how the Lebanese Broadcasting Network, the national radio station, was able to build bridges with the theater scene and disseminate theatrical performances to a diverse audience.

But as with the tele-visual record, it seems that many of these taped performances have been irreparably damaged through poor storage and decay.

Actor, playwright and theater historian Hanan Hajj Ali, the mind behind this seminar, has hopes that in the not-too-distant future a more concerted effort will be made to preserve the country’s theatrical patrimony.

“We hope to establish a modest center,” Hajj Ali told The Daily Star. “We hope it will [also] be a serious one, trying to document and reach a kind of archive for performances, theater etcetera. This is a project under construction. We have some allies for this project from cultural centers. It is a real idea and a real project.

“I don’t know when it will come to life … Maybe it will happen in one or two years. For the time being it is a project and a dream. It is a present necessity, so we hope that it will happen.”

Sunday’s final talk was given by artist, writer and educator Walid Sadek, who advanced some cautionary claims about the concept of an archive. Associating an archive with some notion of power or authority, Sadek warned that such authorities might have aims quite distinct from those of the thespian and the historian – in particular an interest in preventing any questioning of the status quo.

The message of the conference seemed to be that, while individual artists are becoming more savvy to the documentation of their work, major institutions aren’t pulling their weight.

For the time being, then, Lebanon’s rich theatrical history is at a surprising remove from the “amoral, technocratic void” of the information superhighway.

“50 Days 50 Years” continues the Sunflower Cultural Center until April 23. For more information visit www.shamslb.org or call +961-1-38-12-90.