Ashtray Floors, Dirty Clothes and Filthy Jokes – Concerts and Social Media

Friday night we made the drive up to Portland to catch The Replacements at the Crystal Ballroom. The show was great, and typical for a Replacements show even after all these years. They can still be sloppy, belligerent, and rock out all at the same time.

I was curious, though, to compare this show to the show I saw at the Newport in Columbus, Ohio about 25 years prior though, mostly to see how mobile technology and social media has changed the experience of going to a show.

While there can be no doubt that it has changed, no one took out a cell phone to catch a video clip like the one above, or take a selfie with the band in the background to share on Instagram back then, for example, I was surprised that it wasn’t as much as I’d seen people complain about. Yeah, pretty much everyone took a few photos or videos, but the audience spent far more time just enjoying a good show. If you read many of the old timers talk about shows, you’d think that everyone spent the entire show with their iPhone pointed at the stage. That wasn’t the case. For me, I took about 75 seconds of video, total, out of an almost two hour show. I found that to be pretty typical of most of the other attendees as well.

That’s not earth-shattering. That’s a reality of today’s sharing world. I was having a great time at a great show and I wanted to share that with folks who couldn’t be there in some small way. Isn’t that why we connect online in the first place?

Yes, it’s entirely possible that the older crowd that showed up for a band like the Replacements would not act the same way as a bunch of teen and early twenties concert goers would, and the situation is quite different in a show like that one. But, that’s ok. If they want to have experiences that include their online connections, then so be it. Yeah, it’s not how I would want to see a concert, but for what we pay for concert tickets nowadays, who am I to tell anyone how to enjoy it? As long as their selfie stick doesn’t get in my view, whatever. 😉

On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned before in the post Facebook Use Leads to Depression – Misleading Headline of the Day, just don’t let everyone else’s fun times become a source of feeling bad about your own life, ok?

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