Following up on last weeks post, Someone sent me a link to a CNN Blog called Apparently This Matters.
The Title:
Apparently This Matters: At concerts, put that cell phone down By Jarrett Bellini, CNN
This guy is actually right on the mark- and pretty funny to boot!
Here are a few of his points:
(CNN) — “Wow! I totally just watched the awesome cell phone video you shot at that concert!”
Said nobody ever.
Yet, at some point, we’ve all done it.
The band is on stage. The phone is in your pocket. And, lest you actually just dance and enjoy yourself and maybe scan the floor for dropped cash, you decide, instead, to shoot three minutes of unlistenable pixel puke.
Perhaps you upload the blurry mess to Facebook or YouTube, but in the end, it ultimately just gets filed deep within your camera roll with the pointless images of some overpriced, mediocre meal you ate from a trendy new food truck.
So, recently, the indie rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs decided to try something. They posted a sign: “PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THE SHOW THROUGH A SCREEN ON YOUR SMART DEVICE/CAMERA. PUT THAT SHIT AWAY as a courtesy to the person behind you and to Nick, Karen and Brian. MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS! YEAH YEAH YEAHS” This all came out a couple of weeks ago when a picture of their sign from New York’s Webster Hall was tweeted by Spin magazine, and it quickly got passed around the Internet. The band’s sentiments seemed to strike a nerve.
But never mind the annoyance of having to look at the stage through a sea of bright, glaring viewfinders. Even more than that, it’s all just become sort of sad. We’re disconnected from the music.
It is always weird to me to see people in the first three rows of a show, who went through hell to get those seats, either by paying a lot of money or waiting in line for a long time, photographing and shooting video of the band during the entire show! I always want to ask them what they do with that video or those photos when they get home. Unless they work for the Chicago Sun Times, I am guessing not much.
One thing they do accomplish is they block the view of the people behind them!
I wonder if any of them ever look at the stuff they shoot?