Posted on 09/04/2014 4:38:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
It’s not often I get to cite Peter Frampton. Hell, it’s not often anyone gets to cite Peter Frampton anymore. His massive album “Frampton Comes Alive” was before my time, yet my ears are intimately familiar with the songs on it. “Baby, I Love Your Way” was a staple of junior high dances and couples skates, until such things were replaced by dry humping. So it’s nothing personal when I write that I don’t get much occasion to write about Frampton, he’s just mostly before my time.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still things we can learn from the master of the TalkBox.
At a concert in Indiana this year, Frampton grabbed a fan’s smartphone and threw it because the fan wouldn’t stop filming the show. You might think that’s rude or diva-esque, but Frampton has a point.
In the era of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., etc., etc., there’s barely a moment people aren’t documenting in some form or another. How many friends do you know who post pictures of their every meal? Or every outfit their kid wears? Every concert they attend?
We, as a society, have become so obsessed with documenting and sharing our lives that we’re running risk of missing the living of them part.
I wouldn’t have thought about this topic again had I not had the "Today Show" on in the background Labor Day morning. They had Maroon 5 performing a concert, and I looked up and saw the crowd in front of the stage. Well, I didn’t see the crowd, I saw a sea of smartphones and iPads filming the show. Hundreds of people staring at a small screen to make sure they were framing it properly, meanwhile they’re missing the actual show they’re hoping to capture for eterntity.
I don’t know how many of those videos made it to some social network somewhere, but I do know this: their quality is undoubtedly awful.
Your phone or iPad takes perfectly fine video if you’re in a quiet place, no wind, and you aren’t moving very much. What they don’t do is take anything watchable or listenable in a crowd where people are bopping around and screaming. But that didn’t stop these people from missing a show they were clearly excited about seeing because they were so focused on capturing it.
I’ve seen this many times recently. I went and saw Paul McCartney last year in DC. It was an amazing show. It also filled up the memory of many attendee’s phones because they spent large chunks of it taking video of the bright blurry stage from which noise was blasting. I guarantee none of those videos are watchable, none of the sound is listenable, but they couldn’t stop themselves.
Perhaps the lure of rubbing the noses of their friends and followers who weren’t there in the fact that they were was too great, or maybe they just weren’t smart enough to notice they were missing what they were filming. Whatever the case, they missed it.
Frampton asked, “It's like, why can't you just come to the concert and just live and enjoy the moment?” Good question.
Is it that we’ve become so narcissistic as a society that “if I don’t tweet it, it didn’t happen”? Is this who we’ve always been and are only now enabled to manifest our narcissism because of social media? Have we always been a nation of Kardashians simply waiting for the Kardashians themselves to set us free?
I don’t know why it is, I just know that it is.
Whatever it is, if you’re doing it, you’re missing your life.
I’d bet dollars to donuts that 99 percent of those people who hold their devices over their heads to capture every moment of an event never watch that video, or watch 20 seconds of it, realize it’s awful and delete it. The moment no longer lives on their phone, and it never fully lived in their head.
There’s a simple solution – pay attention to events as they’re happening. If it’s a concert or large event, there is a high quality video of it online already. The day after that McCartney concert I found a website that had live performances, in HD with sound through the soundboard, of every song he did that night, in order. Did it matter that they weren’t THE performances I saw? Of course not. But I saw those performances, and those other clips take me right back to that moment.
It’s time to put down the phones and tablets; it’s time to experience life again. You don’t need shaky, Blair Witch quality video with audio of the people around you butchering your favorite song – live it and remember it.
THEN brag about it on social media to make everyone jealous.
Good read. Spot-on as well.
This is why we have memories. But perhaps today’s youth are so drug-addled in the brain that they can no longer have them.
I agree with this! I was at a religious site in Spain recently where there is a well known figure of the Virgin, located above the altar at an important church. People wait on line for quite some time to go up there, say a prayer, and kiss the figure. But this time, I’d say that about 30% of the people who went up the stairs got to the top, turned around, and took their pictures or had a companion take their pictures, and then walked right on by the Virgin without a glance.
I don’t want to sound like a crabapple! I realize that within limits cell phone photos are fun and appropriate. I take photos of things I think my friends or family would like to see at the moment and send them by SMS. I enjoy getting their photos. But a quick photo of something interesting, shared immediately, is a lot different from the endless photographing or recording of every instant of one’s life, to the point that the actual event is missed or ignored.
Back in 92, I completed a Standing Naval Forces Atlantic cruise. The only camera I had was a Canon sure shot.
Me and a few other guys were essentially tourists. See the sights and take tours. I kept as much film as I could and used it.
Anyway, some gave me grief about taking so many photos during the deployment. Near the end, more than a few wanted to buy snapshots since they were constantly drunk on every port visit.
I have a complaint. It’s hard to chat up women nowadays. It use to be you could sit by a woman at a park or some other place and start chatting. Now, the phone is glued to their heads and they’re mumbling on and on about this and that.
Time marches on.
I think some people, no matter where they are at, are hoping to catch the moment something goes terribly wrong...
Totally agree.
And it’s not just young people. I took my wife to see Michael Bublé for our anniversary. I was surprised to see so many senior adults filming the concert with their phones.
On another note, I distinctly remember walking from grandfather’s hardware store to buy “Frampton Comes Alive” and “Fly Like an Eagle” (Steve Miller Band) from the Ben Franklin five and dime.
For me, I’d prefer to live the moment instead of making a video, but the author just takes it too far. He got a few of the current buzzwords in, but postmodern wasnt used so he still has work to do.
Frampton is clearly a butthead. Didn’t care for his music back in the day, can’t imagine plopping down good money to see him today.
Life is just what happens to you while your busy making other plans. — John Lennon
In the above, your = you’re. Duh.
I will take my 60D and kit with me a lot. Mostly to get stuff for stock video and a photo sometimes. Seeing everyone going crazy with smartphones all the time annoys me to no end. Not every second has to be captured.
I don’t exactly know how to say it but people now don’t LIVE in the way that people did fifty years ago. Children don’t have the same insatiable curiosity and I am hearing small rumblings indicating that some young people are already tired of the constant barrage of technology. I know I am tired of it, I find myself daydreaming of a place with no TV, no computers, no cellphones, in fact not even any electricity.
My wife and I can access more television “channels” than existed in the entire world when I first saw a television but there is very little that I find interesting any longer.
I actually began noticing a long time ago that some people were so obsessed with taking still pictures and videos of events that they missed the actual event. Everyone acting as if they had been hired to film a wedding or something. I practically stopped taking any kind of pictures long ago when I realized how many hundreds of slides and prints I had accumulated, some of them very good if I do say so myself, that were just occupying space in a closet with no one ever looking at them. People take so many pictures now that they defeat the whole purpose of taking pictures, if you have one good picture of something it might be worth looking at but if you have a thousand second rate pictures no one is interested. What is the point of a lot of pictures that people look at a week after the event and then never look at them again?
You think women who do that would have anything to say that's worth hearing?
So True.
Once (circa 1974-75) saw Peter Frampton perform at a high school gym in Connecticut prior to release of ‘Frampton Comes Alive’. Our family home had only one rotary phone in those days...ha! Got no iPhotos, but can still clearly recall Frampton on stage using his talk box...awesome concert with high school friends...great memories!
That's true in my world too. I work with two sorts of birders: those who must stop, get out the camera, and clumsily capture every bird on film... And those who simply enjoy capturing the moment of spending a short time with a beautiful, wild bird, and observing it.
I will never understand the camera people. It defeats the purpose of seeking the wilderness experience in the first place.
I can’t agree with you that it’s drugs wrecking their memories, but the continuous attack on the attention span that’s been going on, by my reckoning, with MTV.
For example, count — if you can — the “cuts” in a TV commercial. The 15-second commercials (because 30 seconds is too long these days) might have ten or more, and it’s the very rare 30-second commercial that has less than twenty.
Some commercials, UFC pay-per-view fights come to mind, are literally uncountable without rewatching via the DVR at half speed. I’ve counted over 50 “cuts” in some 30-second commercials. That’s not even something you are supposed to watch; that’s something that’s just supposed to make you think, “wow, something cool is happening here, I think.”
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