Last night was the premiere of Rihanna Live – a live webcast of a Rihanna show where she launches her new album. I had a look at it last night during the launch, and it was a pretty epic production, apart from the poor streaming we get in South Africa.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. Take note of this screen shot of the stream. Notice all the little screens? Almost everyone is documenting the event. The camera’s made a VERY explicit point of taking crowd shots of everyone with their phones whipped out.
It makes a lot of sense seeing as a while ago Nokia had “The 4th Screen” video that everyone was blogging about. I didn’t, but here it is below:
Now, I’m actually finding The 4th Screen pretty damn irritating. No one is having a party anymore, everyone is too busy documenting it. The other crowd shots were of people standing around with their hands in the air, holding their video camera or cellphone. The same happened a while back at the Vice Magazine party, which was billed as being bat-shit crazy, but none of the people who would normally go bat-shit crazy attended. It was full of industry folk hanging around at “the cool event”. It was still a cool event, Jack Parow, Die Antwoord and Driemanskap played some good music, but everyone was either too busy “watching” and documenting, and not “participating”. It fell flat because of that even though it had lots of potential.
And I’m kind of feeling the same about people documenting events/gigs/partys using their phones. When you tell the world “I’m having this amazing time at this party, here is a photo”, it can’t be that amazing because you took the time out to document, upload and share. Sure it’s quick and easy to do, but still… why?
Now, I’ve done my fair share of documenting for 10and5 – we covered the Loeries quite extensively, as well as some other events, but that’s always been because it was work. One feels obligated to document it since you are drinking their bar dry on your media passes. Lovely. But the times that I’ve been having a rocking party are typically the times that I’ve left the documenting up to other people. Like We Are Awesome, JR or Justin. Or whoever has a camera out at that stage.
When everyone is documenting the event, no one is participating and it makes the event fall flat. Put away your cellphone every now and again and participate.