I usually avoid Times Square, but I had bought my ticket to see American Authors five months earlier and so happily jostled the turtle-paced tourists. As we entered the dark Best Buy Theater, my friend said, “This is so nice!” I thought she was happy about getting a spot soclose to the stage, but instead she smiled at her phone, “There’s Wi-Fi here.” My friend wasn’t alone. Before the first jubilant percussion beats could settle, an iPad blocked my visibility like a solar eclipse. Turning for a better view revealed a conglomeration of glowing devices – not only grabbing pics and vids, but tweeting, texting, snapchatting, posting, gramming, vining.
I saw an audience controlling the experience instead of letting the experience entrance them. Our smartphones, and the instant communication they lend tempt us to forget the real moment in which we are involved. Musicians create something powerful to enjoy, but most audience members insist on retaining the power of tangible devices instead of surrendering to the music’s intangible beauty. The guttural throb of the bass guitar resets my heartbeat, but nothing can overpower the frenetic pattern of fingers on lucent screens. Is this an essential part of the concert experience or a divergence from it?
“Attention spans are at an all-time low,” says Andy Greene writing for Rolling Stone, “and the ubiquity of smartphones has resulted in a huge percentage of the audience at any given show barely paying attention to the action onstage.” According to T-Mobile, 47% of audience members text during shows.
There are obvious downsides to introducing a smartphone into the concert’s mise-en-scene. It is distracting for fellow fans and, depending on the type of concert and proximity to the stage, the artists. Obsessive documenting promises to more accurately preserve memories, but a study by Linda Henkel for Psychological Science shows that gathering digital documentation actually taints our memory. Preserving content that was only supposed to be remembered, not documented, can miss the point. “Memories can be perfect, live performances never are,” classical violinist James Ehnes told The Huffington Post.
A classical concert is a different atmosphere than a rock performance, and the invasiveness of technology may be relative to each. But no amount of audio or visual stimulation can negate the distraction of an LED screen shoved in your face by an over-eager fan. As far as documenting for records sake, it is not difficult to find concert recordings on YouTube. Most artists produce live session music videos, and most music festivals release professional recordings of the events. Regardless of genre, music is an expression that can shake our souls if we let it. Or we can focus on crafting masterpieces like #omg #liveinnyc.
There are redemptive qualities to inviting phones into concert spaces. Having a little recorded segment – despite grainy quality and muffled sound – is a treasured I was there. But the distraction risked for these mementos could make what is being remembered less potent, even though the “memory" is tangibly preserved. We are enthralled by presence – live events, celebrity sightings – but when that presence appears we snatch it, constrain it into 140 characters on a four inch screen and send it back out into the world thin and flat. It is like taking off 3D glasses at a movie: everything is distorted and uncomfortable.
I felt this discombobulating headache at the American Authors concert. My friend was sending emails while I played ninja to avoid flailing iPads – the mini ones feel mega when they hit you in the nose – and the band I had waited for was not helping the situation. The Brooklyn-based alt-rockers promoted an Instagram and Twitter campaign #bestdayofmylife, after their biggest hit. Besides adding another incentive for all phones on deck, they ran the tagged photos on a huge onstage screen for parts of the performance. Near the middle of the concert, the lead singer triumphantly produced his iPhone to capture the audience sing-along. I smiled, but felt weird. It was mediated art. It felt cheapened, almost like slides of paintings on a screen we could all talk about, instead of the paintings themselves in their grandeur on museum walls.We were close enough to see sweat droplets on the band’s faces, but I felt distanced from the music.
It is not just rock concerts that add phone screens to the light show. The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra actually set aside “tweet seats” in which participants were asked to enjoy the music phone in hand, and live-tweet their experience. Other orchestras and operas followed. Advocates say that this allows audiences to feel more interactive, but do not ask why there is a need to interact. Perhaps a concerto is ideal without our opinions wafting through the airwaves; maybe we are supposed to sit back in awe. Why must we always add ourselves to everything? When is just being there enough?
American Authors and the SFSO have their opponents. According to The Daily Mail, The Lumineers abrasively interrupted their uplifting hit “Ho Hey” during a London concert last year and asked fans to stop filming and “just be human with us.” Beyoncé reprimanded a fan in Atlanta to “put that damn camera down and seize the moment.” According to The LA Times, the fan was too busy filming to sing along into the microphone Beyoncé was holding before his face.
Peter Frampton recently gained media coverage for grabbing a spectator’s phone and throwing it across the crowd. “I was making a statement,” Frampton told USA Today, “why can't you just come to the concert and just live and enjoy the moment?" Frampton is no social media scrooge, he’s one of the few artists who personally engages with his online fan base. But he understands the power of music and hand-held technology as exclusive. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters told his Facebook followers that he “would never turn on a cell phone at any musical event.” Jack White told Conan that he is saddened by people who “document the moment but aren’t in the moment.” The Huffington Post reports that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs prohibit the tendency to “watch the show through a screen.” Prince posts his “Purple Rules” when touring that forbid phones in the concert hall.
Outcries like these do not seem to be just about profit and image, but rather a call to be more human. These artists are not damning social media, but reminding fans that there is a spiritual and emotional connection between music and the listener, and the concert experience is weakened without it. “As with any human interaction,” writes NPR music editor Stephen Thompson, “the best moments in life and music happen when everyone involved is fully plugged in to the experience — and, by extension, unplugged from everything else.” If the purpose of the concert is the experience of the music, then smartphones detract from that, and if the purpose of social media and mobile messaging is communication, a concert distracts from that. To everything there is a season.
The nearly limitless accessibility provided by smartphones fuels the idea that sharing things is more important than doing things. While sharing might be caring, we must remember that obsessive documenting changes the artistic structure of a concert atmosphere. “The need to ‘document’ one's life in every detail is a mania that can subtract from one's enjoyment of the moment, and, more emphatically, one's memory of a special event,” continues Ehnes. Concerts are collective experiences between audiences and artists, but not necessarily including a pod of iPhones. Placing a screen between eyes and stage alters the DNA of a piece. Unless you can combine both experiences, you must ask which expands your world more: eyes piercing a screen or music piercing a soul.
Twitter has a unique place in the social media sphere in that it was created purposefully for live events. Twitter’s mission statement is“to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” According to Twitter’s website, more than 80% of active users tweet from their phones, making the flutter of the little blue bird at concerts less surprising.
The purpose of concert going is less definable than the purpose of tweeting. What seems to be unique about live music is presence, what Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich calls “intimacy.” To fully receive that presence we must ourselves be present. But perhaps we all define this presence and purpose differently. Where is the line between engaging in Twitter’s purpose and engaging in the concert’s purpose? Should these purposes coexist?
Whether or not they should coexist, they do. Smartphones invading musical experiences are inevitable, but so are creative solutions. Some artists request that pictures and videos only be taken during the first few songs. A start-up called Yondr distributes cases for phones that auto-lock once the concert starts, giving fans the peace of keeping phones on their person while removing the temptation to use them. Yondr advertises phone-free hands in the air celebrating a collective, almost tribal, human experience under the slogan “Be Here Now.”
The American Authors show left me disconcerted. Bright screens attached to waving arms looked like some kind of extraterrestrial seabed, or the luminescent Tree of Souls in Avatar. I took a few videos, but did not feel the need to prove I was there. Four dynamic artists lost their voices proving that to me. Maybe other audience members engaged in the concert through their social and camera apps, but I did not feel present until my iPhone was in my pocket. I told myself be here now. I’ll remember.
