It used to be Bics and Zippos at the concerts; now it’s the Blackberry and the iPhone. Our heroes used to receive symbolic flickering offerings of finite flame for their talent; now they’re faced with armies of lenses and rechargeable smartphones. It’s easy to project that there’s a direct relationship between the smoke we choke down on our way through concert venue smoke pits and the onslaught of digital recording devices. I ask, where are the dead lighters?

This shift represents more than a romantic decline. There’s a key difference between what was going on then, and what’s going on now. Wherein the past, we thrust our mini torches high to encourage encores or to salute power ballads, all the while focusing our sights on fingers as they traveled up and down guitar necks, the Blackberry variety is one that gets direct attention when it’s lofted above the masses; with smartphones, we experience the moment secondhand as it happens.

This shift changed the way we experience events—in a big way. One needs only glance at a photo album from a recent party to see the evidence. We’re at a point where we can’t tell the difference between whether the keg stands at that last mixer were legitimate were or if they were staged for the greedy lenses of digital cameras. Friends are measured for their modeling capabilities. We’re sizing up and documenting every moment, real or not,f or a gallery that exists in a simulated social world.

At arenas, art galleries, concert halls and award ceremonies, look around and you’ll spot someone spending their entire time there ogling the image on their smartphone. Instead of watching the experience happening right in front of them they watch it through a low resolution, four-inch display. When Ferris Beuller broke the fourth wall to deliver that important maxim about how “life moves pretty fast” and “if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” surely he didn’t mean to encourage lives spent living vicariously through point-and-shoots. Beuller’s was an argument for a life lived in three dimensions.

It is possible to reject this new world over-documentation trend without yielding to the philosophies of the Luddite and the techno-phobe. Participating in the world of print and online journalism, staff at The Ontarion are entirely sympathetic to the desire to document—we even get access to special tools that help us do it. Voice recording devices and SLR cameras are essential to our efforts at providing accurate, quality representations of the world. At times we even rely on amateur recordings of concerts when we encounter stories we couldn’t actually be available to cover firsthand.

What’s important to recognize is that documentation, like most things, is good in moderation.  Professional photographers at concerts are forced to adapt to this rule. Press passes for the photo pit generally admit camera carriers for only the opening three songs that any band plays. It might be burdensome for photographers seeking good action shots, but it’s also a blessing in disguise: shooting a mere three songs out of a two-hour set (unless you’re shooting a DJ Shadow vs. Cut Chemist collaborative set) also affords you time to take in the atmosphere of the event. If professional photographers can do this and hold jobs in a competitive market, chances are you smartphone jockeys can do the same.

Think of it this way: vacation is more fun when you’re there than it is when you’re clicking miserably through your iPhoto album regretting that you left. You’ll regret not being there even more if you realize you spent the entire time squinting through a viewfinder.

Life is happening around you in the highest resolution possible at every second. Think about that the next time you reach for the smartphone in your pocket because something awesome is going on.

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