Apple has patented a technology that can block the iPhone’s camera feature. As the Telegraph reports, “The company’s invention would allow venues to use an infrared beam to disable photography on mobile phones, preventing people from taking videos and photos.”
When switched on, the patent says, the phone would simply display a “recording disabled” message when audience members attempt to take photographs or videos. Alternatively, a watermark or blur effect may be applied, to discourage people from sharing them.
What Apple hasn’t done is issue a statement about if or how the technology would be used. But the patent comes at a moment in which a handful of famous folks have spoken out against the use of phones at their performances. Mostly these artists are outraged by the way phones interfere with a live performance; there is also angst about sharing content that a select group paid to see with a massive audience of people who paid nothing at all.
Last month, Adele scolded a fan during a show in Verona, Italy, “Could you stop filming me with that video camera?” Patti LuPone snatched a phone from an audience member halfway through a performance of Shows for Days at Lincoln Center last summer. (She’s taken texting theatergoers to task more than once.) When Kevin Spacey heard a phone ring mid-monologue as he was performing in Clarence Darrow at the Old Vic in London in 2014, he shot back, in character, “If you don’t answer that, I will.” Artists from Bjork to Zooey Deschanel have posted signs banning photography at their concerts.
When Benedict Cumberbatch was starring in a crazy-popular Hamlet at London’s Barbican Centre — the show is the fastest-selling production in British history; it sold out within minutes — he made a speech to fans waiting outside the stage door imploring them not to film the performance. “I can see cameras, I can see red lights in the auditorium… it’s blindingly obvious. I could see a red light in the third row on the right, and it’s mortifying.” (The speech, obviously, was filmed and posted online.)
Now seems like a good time to separate concerts — typically raucous, loud events, held in a bar or a nightclub or an arena or a stadium, where an engaged audience member is highly unlikely to be seated and/or silent, nor should they be — from these other forms of entertainment, like movies and live theater.
In a theater, phones are an intrusion. They are, simply put, obnoxious; even on silent, the screen’s bright light disrupts the darkness of the space, and the darkness is vital for the escapist nature of the art form. By all means, punish people who use their phones in theaters. Have ushers do what they would do with any other disruptive audience member: Remove them.
At a concert, though, the atmosphere is completely different, as are expectations for a “good” audience member’s behavior. The idea that your phone is any more distracting than the myriad of other distracting things people do at concerts is just absurd. People talk and shout and sing along; people sit on each others’ shoulders and drink and smoke and make out. While plenty of performers complain about how disruptive phones are at concerts, fans don’t seem to mind them. Because fans understand that to take photos at and short recordings of a concert is to engage more, not less, with what’s happening around them.
When Adele tells fan that to “enjoy it in real life rather than on your camera,” she is creating a false dichotomy. The artists who are against documenting the experience subscribe to the false notion that documenting an experience inherently removes you from that experience. Maybe for some, that’s true! But for two generations of humans who came of ages with phones in hand, documenting the experience is part of the experience, and a crucial one at that. Pics or it didn’t happen, etc.
Even if one were to agree with the premise that phones are a problem for concerts, the fact is that phones have cameras in them. They just… do. The future will not bring us phones with less capability than the phones we have now. 2017 will not spark a rerelease of the Nokia 3360. There is no returning to a time when phones are somehow less integral to the average person’s existence, in recreational settings or otherwise, than they are today. You can’t make the 1989 tour feel like 1989.
It is also ridiculous to suggest that the availability of crappy iPhone videos, available in choppy, shaky YouTube clips, is cannibalizing ticket sales. Those videos aren’t even nibbling at ticket sales. People who want to see Adele will buy tickets to see Adele (you know, if the bots don’t buy them up first. That’s what it looks like when technology ruins live entertainment). The videos are for people who were never buying a ticket anyway. The quality of the videos is laughably bad. And! On the occasion a video is good, or captures some unscripted, delightful moment, the video goes viral, and that virality is free press for the artist, boosted by the credibility that only footage shot by a fan can provide.
But the most important issue isn’t about what, theoretically, this technology could be used for now. It’s how this technology could be abused going forward.
Do we really want Apple to get to decide what we can and can’t record? For now, it’s just for productions of Hamlet. Okay, sure, maybe you don’t care about Hamlet — or maybe you do, and you think phones are ruining the theater, and you’re fine with it. Then what?
Maybe next, Apple decides maybe you shouldn’t be able to film a protest, because it’s disruptive to the police officers trying to maintain order. And then Apple gets pressure from the gun lobby to disable the recording functionality on all the phones within a certain radius of a reported mass shooting, because gun owners have a right to privacy, which maybe means a right to not be Periscoped while committing an act of violence.
Or, even if Apple remains forever on the side of justice and protecting Beyoncé, the technology, once understood, could be duplicated and used by other, less benevolent overlords. What if this technology had existed and been implemented when Eric Garner was trying to tell us he couldn’t breathe? Or when Ronald John was being beaten for jumping a turnstile? Are we really game to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of a less annoying experience at the theater?