Do Smartphones Have a Place at Live Events?

Earlier this year, Hong Kong hosted part of the international art festival, Art Basel. Around that time, Vice Media published this article– a photo essay that tries itself to digest how spectators consume art. Recksik’s photos document people taking photos of art pieces. (A little cyclical, no?) This photo essay’s deceit begs a larger question: how do smartphones change the way we digest and interact with our experiences, and do smartphones undermine the temporality of an experience?

I have noticed myself that easy access to a camera at all hours of the day diminishes my need to mindfully store information. Why memorize a name or a number, when I can just take a picture of it and peek later? Why take the time to look at a beautiful sunset when I can take a picture and look at it later, and ostensibly, forever.

At every concert I’ve been to in the last few years, I’ve noticed an increasing and, to me, troubling trend of people taking photo after photo, video after video, of the performance. It’s hard (read: impossible) to assign value to how someone enjoys a performance, but if I were on stage and the roles reversed, I think I’d be disappointed that people were trying to capture a single moment instead of submitting themselves to a larger group experience.

It would be foolish to admonish smartphones and I am by no means trying to dismiss their utility-  we just have to be smart about the way the we use them. They are incredibly powerful tools that perform a litany of incredibly important functions. Take Check for example. Check is an app that organizes all of your billing and banking information in one place so that you can take care of your bills from anywhere. It might sound kind of boring, but think about this with respect to, say, the 1950’s. Instead of keeping bills in a desk somewhere and going to the bank, post office, and “Ye Olde Bille Shoppe,” we just have to move our finger a couple times on a glowing screen that we can keep in our pocket. Wild.

We are, admittedly, a tech company. We create a product that consumers interact with in a live event setting. It’s a fine line, but our whole ethos is focused on getting audience members to engage more directly with a performance. By making them part of a spectacle, we (in a weird but powerful way) ask people to turn away from their lives inside their phones and, instead, interact with the world right in front of them.

Are we better than a smartphone camera at these events? We think so, but ultimately that is up to you to decide. (We do have camera functions plotted on our product timeline…). Wham City Lights is a powerful tool that can enhance, not hinder, a performance. Just take a look at our run on the Demi Lovato tour. We were able to engage the audience and make them part of Demi’s show. We think that’s cool and you should too!

We want to empower people and we challenge other companies to do the same. The future is daunting, but filled with the opportunity to create meaningful tools to shape our experiences. Let’s be smart and bright and weird, together!