Originally posted by Faceman2000:How about - as someone who doesn’t use cellphones at concerts - we let other people enjoy the concert how they want to while enjoying it the way we want to and stop spending so much time worrying about what others are doing and self-congratulating cuz we do it “the right way”.
Goodness gracious.
Riddle me this:
I'm going to the U2 concert and I'm hoping to enjoy it the way I want to enjoy it, which is to watch it with my own eyes, free of any device. Suddenly, a woman in front of me lifts up her ipad high enough to get a good shot of the band from the seats. What happens then? My way of enjoying the concert (not through a phone or tablet) is suddenly infringed upon because her ipad is blocking my view.
Now we can assume that a U2 concert DVD is going to come out of this tour (which it did), and I'd say we can also probably accept that someone paying to go see a concert has more of a right to enjoy that concert by experiencing it with their eyes, over someone who just wants to sit there filming it, getting their device in people's way. Why? A) Because it's going to be professionally shot anyway, B) because it's far easier to remember an experience when you're actually EXPERIENCING it vs filming it, and C)......do you actually know anyone who watches those videos after the fact? I sure as hell don't, usually because the quality is fucking terrible.
How can you possibly defend this person? And yes, this literally did happen to me. I tapped on her shoulder and told her I couldn't see and she just put the thing away and enjoyed the concert the same way I did lol.
But really. that argument is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you really say that a concert full of people filming is better or even the same as one without it? When everyone is there and absorbed into what's happening in front of them vs what's being captured on their screen, it becomes a shared experience. When people are looking at it through their phone, they're not REALLY experiencing it, they're focused on making sure they have a good shot, and they're thinking about how many internet points they're going to get after the fact once they post it on social media. I've been to say, 10 concerts in the past year, some of them having a ton of phones, some of them having none. I can tell you from my experience that the shows without phones had a way better atmosphere, had WAY more audience interaction, and I found myself being distracted a LOT less.
To me it's almost the same as someone taking their phone out during a movie. It's a huge faux pas, and that should be how it's viewed at concerts too.