Just Enjoy The Concert

Nick Fulton on people with phones out at concerts:

Sadly, memory-making as visual bootlegging is now wholly a part of the live music experience and it has been since the advent of smartphones. Watching people not watch, or watch through their screens, or simply hit record and clumsily loft the phone above them—what’s the purpose? To remember for all time? To share the experience? What friend is going to be impressed or even have the patience to watch a barely focused video shot from hundreds of feet away, the audio blown out, the shouted-along chorus of the superfan in seat 78JJ muting the band itself?

It’s time we stopped being so tolerant of these serial snappists.

Sometimes I take my phone out at concerts, but I try to be as quick about it as possible. In general, though, I try to keep my shit in my pocket.

If performers want people to not use phones, they need to tell them because people are idiots and need to be told what to do.