alt Hacker NewsThe Dance Floor Is Disappearing in a Sea of Phones
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Berghain puts stickers on your phone cameras, it’s pretty non intrusive while substantially improving the party experience. I didn’t see a single phone in the air on the dancefloor. It was quite refreshing, felt like partying in the 2000s.
Er... Source for this claim?
If there are people filming on their dancefloor you're in a shitty club.
OK, so the author and a handful of people they quite (including some global superstars who obviously don't represent any kind of norm) seem to be finding themselves in shitty clubs more often than they used to. And therefore we conclude all clubs are shitty now?
Nightlife is the least heterogeneous and least globalised form of public life that exists in "the west". If someone thinks they can make sweeping statements about the state of raving writ large, I don't really take them seriously.
Bloomberg is an interesting news outlet. My whole life I thought of them as purely financial-based reporting. But I've seen lots of lifestyle stuff from them too. And usually well written and interesting angles.
Maybe journalism isn't totally dead yet.
The phone is a kind of shield for the person holding it above their head. It safely removes them from having to fully engage with what's in front of them.
The camera both removes the person from the scene and also by recording enables the event to be captured in a format to be reviewed again. The videos are never actually intended to be watched again or shared with friends though but they are proof that the person was physically there (if not wholly present).
There was a video I recently saw about how birthday parties should be filmed. Instead of a video of just the birthday girl in front of a cake reacting to her friends singing happy birthday, she takes the camera, flips it so we don't see her anymore but we see her friends singing facing her with faces full of love.
One of the many victims of ubiquitous cameras. Along with communal showers.
A non-paywalled discussion on the subject from a year ago:
Nightclub stickers over smartphone rule divides the dancefloor (85 points, 91 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352825
I've never understood the appeal of so-called "dance" events.
Crowds of thousands like sardines swaying-at-best to the DJ being treated as a rockstar but without the talent and entertainment as far as I can see.
Note: this isn't a rockist viewpoint; I'm a dancer who is frustrated at the lack of options to actually move about in space on a dancefloor with other dancers who are there to actually, you know, dance.
I hate the way the word has been co-opted by what appears to be a generation of drugged-out sheep who seem incapable of soulful movement.
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Search youtube for laserface and gareth emery. The sea of phones are all recording the stage. So they are the same color as the show. They turn the otherewise dark audience into a reflection, adding to the effect. This is not a bad thing.
As for dancing, dancing is for clubs. Clubs are not concert halls. You dance at a club. You watch a show at a hall. Only DJ-types who are confused about whether they are record-spinning robots or stars in a spotlight cannot tell the difference.
I remember being on a concert relatively recently, a few years ago. nearly everyone had their phones up, mine was in a pocket. no one made a single movement that resembled dance, everyone just... stood still. that differed by a great measure from several concerts I attended circa 2018-19.
on both music fests, I was in flow. I've been dancing - it's a usual thing all humans naturally do when they hear rhythm that resonates with them unless they consciously resist dancing for one reason or another. though, this time, no one joined me. people just made space around me and pointed their cameras at me, which created a ton of unease and I eventually stopped. it was enough to get viral in local Telegrams, but I had no joy in that. in the moment, I wanted to shout, "duh, why aren't you all dancing? put down your goddamn cameras, you can always scroll later!"
phones, primarily due to their current addictive implementation, are such a killjoy. I hope that one day, devices like Clicks Communicator will change this.