A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to see Linkin Park (along with Incubus and MuteMath) in concert at the oh-so-strangely named Comfort Dental Amphitheater in Denver. (Or, as I like to call it, the amphitheater formerly known as Fiddler’s Green.) A friend of mine had won tickets and invited me to tag along, and so I did.
Now, I’ve been to a lot of concerts in the last 30 years or so, at big venues and small ones. There’s not a lot that I haven’t seen as far as crazy band antics or, at times, crazier crowd antics. (Fans lobbing fireworks off the upper deck at a 1987 Motley Crue show tops the latter list.)
But this concert was fundamentally different than any I’d ever been to before. And those differences had nothing to do with the bands performing, the giant video screen behind them or the pyrotechnics that sent waves of heat rolling over the audience.
No, what I noticed this time was the way smartphones and mobile communications are completely reshaping the way we experience even something as raucously visceral as a heavy metal rock concert. Three things in particular stood out to me.
First, between the three acts, the video screen in front of us continually scrolled both texts and tweets from audience members. Now, I’ve seen this before. What was different this time was the way that the messages onscreen created a strangely communal experience among the concert attendees. When someone texted something like, “To the hot girl in the purple shirt in section 204 … umm … ur HOT!” everyone would crane their necks around to try to see who was the object of some anonymous texter’s leering attention.
But it hardly stopped there. People tried to one-up each other with humorous, pop-culture-related messages about everything under the sun. My friend and I ended up talking with two high school guys behind us because the messages onscreen kept generating interesting—if often strange—subjects of conversation. Looking around, I could see that other pockets of people were having exactly the same experience.
Second, the impulse to capture concert moments on camera just keeps getting stronger. Again, I’ve been to shows where people used their smartphones to get a song on digital film. That’s hardly a new phenomenon. But this time, perhaps because I’m not actually a huge Linkin Park, Incubus or MuteMath fan, I was more able to just watch how people were interacting with the show.
Many folks—many of them—used their phones’ cameras not just to get a snapshot here or there or even film a song or two. No, they held their phones up and filmed the entire concert (or most of it). Instead of actually watching the bands they’d presumably paid good money to see, they were watching their phones to make sure they captured the images perfectly in their entirety.
In this sense, smartphone cameras and their video capability increasingly create a mediated experience that, in my old-fashioned estimation, kept these people from actually being present in the moment in the name of preserving said moment for digital posterity.
Finally, there was another group of people who, quite frankly, didn’t seem to be present at the concert at all. These were the folks for whom guitars blasting at 120 dB and explosive walls of flame were, it seemed, just so much background noise as they surfed away on their phones for much of the show.
Two young women in front of me, I noticed, spent virtually the entire show posting stuff to what looked to be their Facebook accounts. Now, they could’ve been doing a moment-by-moment review of the concert for their friends, I suppose—except for the fact that they barely even looked up from their smartphone screens to notice what was going on around them.
For them, I wondered what the point of coming to the concert was at all, since they didn’t seem the least bit interested in it. What commanded their complete attention was the little gadget in front of them and the digital world it gave them access to … as opposed to the real one happening all around them.
In all these ways, I was more aware than ever of how smartphone technology continues to shape and influence the ways we experience life and relationship—even at something as loud and seemingly compelling as a Linkin Park concert.
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