You should have been there, man...

Call me boring, but I’ve never understood the desire to attend concert after concert of the same artist.  In fact, scoring $80 tickets in the nose-bleed section for a concert of a popular band always seemed like a waste of money.  I’m not criticizing, it’s just not important to me.  Despite my lack of interest in even attending concerts, much less habitually paying to see the concert and then watching the concert through a “tiny little rectangular digital box” to record it, I found Jessa Lingel and Mor Naaman’s article, You should have been there, man: Live music, DIY content and online communities very interesting.  While I initially found the recording practice strange, it did cause me to do a little of my own research.  I have a good friend who is crazy for the English band, James.  Since I have known her, she has traveled to concerts all over the United States, and even to London, just to see this band.  Besides knowing every word to every song, she knows the full names of all of the band members and the names of their spouses and children.  She even knows their hobbies.  For example, she knows one guitarist is also a carpenter, and another one is an amateur photographer.  So I called her and asked her if she had ever video recorded a concert.  She has recorded a portion of every concert she’s attended.  One interesting fact about my friend is that she is paranoid about the internet, so she doesn’t have a Facebook, much less a YouTube account.  It’s a conspiracy thing in her mind.  Anyway, she says she does make recordings to keep them as a “scrapbook” of concerts as Isaac does.  Additionally, she searches YouTube for videos taken at concerts she has attended so that she can watch the concert again and look for herself in the crowd.  She always watches the concerts she was unable to attend, which is most of them because they’re somewhere other than the U.S.  And despite her distrust of social media in general, my friend did open a Twitter account so that she could see the panoramic photos that one of the band members takes of the audience at every concert.   In the study, Heidi said she created her videos, “…for myself, but I also wanted to do it so everyone else who was at the show … could still remember it.”  And Frances said she recorded and posted the concerts for people who couldn’t afford to attend them.  Well, the recipient of these videos is my friend, who is a committed lurker of pop culture.  And although she refuses to collaborate, my friend does know how to sort and find what she considers the most reliable recorder of these concerts in England.

All in all, after reading the study, I gained a greater appreciation for the community of people who volunteer to document and share (for the joy of sharing) these moments in our culture